Suits LA “Seven Days a Week and Twice on Sunday”
Created and written by Aaron Korsh
Directed by Victoria Mahoney
Airs Sundays on NBC
Remember Suits, a “Characters Welcome” era USA drama, a niche series that was just ridiculous and horny enough to work, a Boston Legal-esque series with the added hook of having a protagonist with a bit of pathos in it (remember, Mike Ross began his legal con to pay his grandmother’s medical bills)? Well, that is exactly what Suits LA, NBC’s misguided quasi-sequel to Suits (and the short-lived spinoff Pearson, if we’re getting technical) is not; “Seven Days a Week and Twice on Sunday” is a strange misfire, removing any of the fun, sexiness, and high melodramatics of the original, for something much drier and bitter, a series that seems to crib more from shows like Succession (and poorly so) than it does from its own dramatic lineage. Outside of a few vaguely alluring interpersonal conflicts, Suits LA is nothing more than a bright and shiny rehash of ideas explored in much better, more thoughtfully crafted series.
The biggest problem with Suits LA‘s pilot episode is its obvious identity crisis; originally adapted from an original series pitch into a Suits spinoff after the 2011-2019 series saw a spike in popularity on streaming networks, “Seven Days a Week and Twice on Sunday” doesn’t do a great job of disguising the fact it wasn’t supposed to be a Suits show; though the original was able to rely on the known tenants of the legal system to guide audiences into its world, Suits LA does absolutely nothing to establish what the work of its characters actually is – instead, we spend a lot of time focusing on the angry face of entertainment lawyer Ted Black (Stephen Amell, channeling his Arrow gruff through a more traditionally-styled suit this time around) as he fights off the mob, daddy issues, and a cutthroat corporate partner-turned-rival (played by The Walking Dead‘s Josh McDermitt), who upends Black’s entire entertainment law/criminal defense firm for silly reasons halfway through the pilot.
“Seven Days a Week and Twice on Sunday” actually opens in 2011, briefly detailing Black’s last case as a criminal prosecutor (on multiple occasions, he remarks on how he doesn’t understand the point of criminal defense) before a quick shift to modern-day LA, where Suits LA drops the audience in the middle of a half-dozen plotlines, which it then spends the rest of the episode trying to backtrack and explain to the audience. Some of these beats – upstart young black woman who’ll do anything to advance, dick-swinging contests between dudes that take place in unseen legal contracts – are cribbed directly from the old series, but instead of corporate law, LA tries to endear its audience to the world of entertainment law… by not making it clear what any of these characters do, except undermine each other at every turn.
There’s a lot of plot Suits LA throws its audience right in the middle of; and though its nice to see a series confident in the stories it’s already halfway through telling, it’s an absolute chore to see it try to do the necessary work to build out the actual narratives and personalities through a group of self-obsessed characters, led by Black – who I might add, ends the pilot episode by visiting his estranged, dying father on the other side of country, only to chastise him for never truly accepting his mentally disabled brother (Carson A. Egan) and grunting at him that he’s going to “die alone”.
There’s also Black’s bitter mentee (Bryan Greenberg, who is still Jake on One Tree Hill to me), a merger that is abandoned halfway through the pilot, a famous actor murder case – and a cameo by John Amos (RIP) as John Amos, who imparts a bit of important knowledge to Black that he utterly ignores before going on a tirade against his father and former business partners. I’m all on board with a series willing to drop its audience into the deep end, there’s nothing for these stories to tether themselves to; the characters, from trust fund baby turned pro bono associate Amanda Stevens (LOST‘s Maggie Grace) to upstart, willing to sacrifice anything and everyone for success young buck Leah Power (Alice Lee), there isn’t a single intriguing and/or empathetic quality to find between them; and although that can work for a series like the original Suits or something like Billions, they still understood even a light touch of pathos for its characters fills the emotional space where dry plots about contract negotiations and secret corporate conspiracies never can.
In a really weird way, Suits LA feels like an anti-Rectify of all things, centering its narrative on a man who absolutely refuses to recognize and consider the existential implications of his behavior in order to do the work to reconcile them. It does so by ripping off Succession without doing any of the character work (or having any of the humor, or sociopolitical intrigue) that made Succession such a phenomenal series; in Suits LA, it feels heartlessly sewed onto a pilot script that was already trying to fit its round self through a square hole – neither Amell’s performance nor the writing of Ted’s more “reflective” moments suggest any real curiosity about this strange man, who considers representing celebrities in legal matters a blood-soaked battlefield of moral compromises, bitchy attitudes, and slim ties – I should also note we never see any of the real work being done, which further undercuts how little this series is interested in the depth of its subjects as anything more than a quick cash-in on an established IP (one whose enduring popularity remains clearly remains a mystery to the powers that be greenlighting a second failed Suits spinoff).
Mostly, though, Suits LA feels like a drama desperately trying to find its own identity, and coming up with nothing – which is unfortunate, because the blueprint for a more interesting, dynamic series is certainly there. It’s way, way under the surface, buried under way too many one-dimensional characters in two-dimensional stories, but there’s obviously an appeal to watching a bunch of assholes be really good at being assholes. Part of that said appeal comes from a healthy bit of sexuality, which Suits LA is COMPLETELY absent of; it is one of the most neutered, passionless pilots this genre’s ever seen, a dramatic series about hot people making bad choices that refuses to be sexy, confrontational, or poignant at any point in its first 42 minutes (the closest it comes is a surprise explosion in the first 45 seconds).
Though I don’t think anyone expected Suits LA to reinvent the wheel, the completely disfigured, mindless incarnation of the original that is “Seven Days a Week and Twice on Sundays’ is still surprising; it seemed the creative equivalent of a layup to recreate the dynamics of Suits for a new audience – though this is why lightning is so hard to catch in a bottle, right? Regardless, Suits LA is one of TV’s most unappealing new series of the year, a collection of boring characters and unremarkable stories that for most of its running time, seems unconvinced of its own existence, unable to do anything but mimic the behaviors and rhythms of other, better series.