How did Suits become America’s mostwatched TV show of the summer?
Since I work in the business of talking television, I am often asking people what they’re watching. And this summer, the predominant answer – usually in the rushed, conspiratorial tone one takes when admitting a guilty pleasure – has been Suits, the glossy legal procedural which ran on USA from 2011 until 2019 and recently arrived on Netflix. My sister is watching Suits. My boyfriend’s mom is watching Suits. I am now rewatching Suits, a show I enjoyed 10 years ago but mostly forgot about other than as a fantasy of sexy tailoring and the launchpad of one Meghan Markle.
I’m not alone; the show has broken several Nielsen viewing records this summer in the US and became Netflix’s most-watched acquired series in a single week, for a streamer that once had Friends, The Office, Breaking Bad and more in its library. Suits accounted for 18bn minutes of viewing on streamers in the month of July (which also coincided with record-low viewing for linear and cable TV, where Suits originated). Suffice to say, a lot of people are watching Suits this summer.
Which is a little surprising, since the show has been largely out of conversation for awhile, except when mentioned in the same sentence as the Duchess of Sussex, and has been available to stream on Peacock for several years. (The ninth season is still only available on Peacock and Amazon Prime
Video; streaming rights are weird.) Yet it makes sense for several reasons. It’s partly a slow TV summer, as streaming services have spaced out premieres to account for the joint writers’ and actors’ strikes. (Also, HBO’s The Idol never took off, leaving a void in appointment television.) And it’s partly the show’s straightforward, magnetic appeal as one of the decade’s breeziest and most watchable corporate fantasies – its windowed Manhattan offices always sunlit, its lawyers chronically sleep-deprived but with nary a puffy eye nor mistimed barb.
Suits is emblematic of USA’s “blue sky” era, along with series like Royal Pains, In Plain Sight, Burn Notice and White Collar – slick, cheeky shows with exceptionally clever protagonists and an overall sense of lightness, in feeling and in design. (It never rains.) Suits is textbook competency porn, in which beautiful people scheme well and deliver under pressure. The primary conflict is almost comically low-stakes: Mike Ross (Patrick J Adams), a downon-his-luck genius with a photographic memory of legal textbooks but no college degree, fakes Harvard Law credentials for a job under the infamously slippery closer Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht). The secret, repeated ad nauseam, threatens everyone – the firm’s boss, Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres), the ambitious paralegal Rachel (Markle), the snappy secretary Donna (Sarah Rafferty) and the chip-on-his-shoulder foil Louis (Rick Hoffman) – with ruin, or opportunity. The show’s central relationship is the spiky bromance between Mike and Harvey, two would-be Harvard buddies, had Mike not been an orphan and autodidact. Even the pivotal moment when Mike strides into prison (for white-collar crime) is sundappled and relaxed, almost chipper.
Like the other blue sky shows, it’s ideal second screen viewing; you can easily multi-task while enjoying Harvey and Donna’s flirtatious banter, Louis’s ferocious scheming or Jessica’s, yes, suits. (The dress code for women skews skin-tight, high-heeled and expensive.) That viewers enjoy easy, passive procedurals is not surprising; the demand for lightly serialized, case-of-the-week TV has existed for nearly as long as the medium itself. Suits, with its 134 episodes that you can dip in and out of at will, is the type of show linear TV used to excel at (and that companies like Netflix used to burnish their subscriptions), but that streaming services have struggled to replicate, instead producing either tightly serialized “moment” TV with bloated budgets or disposable fluff. As the critic Alan Sepinwall pointed out, Suits once again demonstrates the persistent audience demand for a genre of shows that streaming services refuse to make, or make well.
There’s also the less quantifiable but still pervasive interest in an era that’s just bygone. Suits, with its aspirational wealth, diverse cast of equally cutthroat lawyers and sunny view of legal machinations, is very 2010s. The Suits rewatch feels of a piece with this year’s rewatch of Girls, the emblematically millennial HBO series which also premiered in 2011, and is also set in New York (though actually filmed here; Suits was shot in Toronto). Like Taylor Swift’s Eras tour – which, more than anything, is the monocultural moment of the summer – watching Suits is an exercise in mid-to-recent nostalgia. It’s also particularly interesting, and weird, to watch a pre-royal Meghan Markle at work, just before and during the massive, intrusive fame eclipsed her acting career.
But perhaps the ultimate answers to Suits’ renaissance is the power of suggestion and word of mouth – Netflix put it on its homepage, and some people watched, then told their friends. Viewership kept Suits in the top 10 list, and more people watched and told their friends. Sometimes streaming popularity is alchemical, sometimes it’s arbitrary, often both. Either way, the Suits rewatch boosts the case for residuals. Viewership of streaming services has surpassed that of linear TV, though I’m not sure it’s a good sign for streamers that one of its most popular options is a cable show that’s been off the air for years.