Self-detonating television
Suits returns this week after blowing up its central plot device. Will fans stick around?
Spoiler alert: This story includes plot details from the previous half-season of Suits.
For five seasons, the Toronto-shot series Suits has played hard and fast with viewer belief that leading character Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) could make it in the cutthroat world of law without ever having obtained a law degree.
A brilliant hustler with a photographic memory, Mike’s journey from drug dealer, to lawyer, to junior partner at his firm has been catapulted along the way by his mentor and best friend Harvey Specter (Gabri- el Macht) — an actual Harvard grad with an equally brilliant legal mind.
Together, the duo have managed to strike deals in some of the most complex cases around, while only allowing a handful of others in on the big secret that Mike Ross is actually a fraud. Until now, that is.
As the series gears up for its Season 5B premiere on Bravo Wednesday night, viewers will finally see the fallout of Mike’s arrest during last summer’s finale, which fittingly took place minutes after he handed in his resignation.
That game-changing twist will not only drive the final six episodes of the season, but will set the show on an entirely new track from when it first started in 2011. As creator Aaron Korsh said at the time, “Everybody’s been shot in the foot.”
This is far from the first time a series has attempted to switch its original makeup by undertaking such a storyline alteration. The Big Bang Theory proved it had more heart than just four geeks and a hot girl when it introduced Bernadette (Melissa Rauch) and Amy (Mayim Bialik) in Season 3. Lost famously took all expectations off the table in its third season finale when the show introduced a flash-forward sequence that altered the rules of time travel as viewers knew it. And Dexter took a famously dark turn after the death of Rita (Julie Benz) at the hands of the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow) in Season 4.
Not all gambles pay off when it comes to viewers; Dexter and The Big Bang Theory managed to grow audiences following those twists, while Lost continued plummeting in the ratings until its series finale three seasons later.
Whether Suits will benefit from such a massive storyline shift remains to be seen. But given the show’s mixed critical reception over the years as the “will they or won’t they find out Mike’s secret” hook began to play on repeat, having the character’s secret out was a shakeup that needed to happen in order to keep the series fresh.
Eventually, “Mike was going to have to pay the piper,” Adams says. “These back six episodes are definitely Mike-focused, but everybody will have to rally together behind him, in the same sort of Suits way that everybody loves.”
The verdict is still out on that one.