[Suits is half comfort watch, half reckoning — and America
can’t stop streaming. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SUITS IS AN UNLIKELY TIME CAPSULE FOR A TROUBLED DECADE  
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Aja Romano
September 9, 2023
Vox
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_ Suits is half comfort watch, half reckoning — and America can’t
stop streaming. _

Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter in Suits., hane Mahood/USA
Network/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

 

Aja Romano [[link removed]] writes about pop
culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a
staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics
Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet,
and the culture wars.

_____

It’s 2023, and everyone is watching _Suits_. The question is,
which _Suits_ are they watching?

In one corner, we have _Suits_, seasons one through four, the
absurdist morality play. The concept: a high-powered Manhattan law
firm and the cutthroat corporate lawyers who do their clients’
bidding. The title: A reference to the sleazy characters, the glitzy
aesthetic, and the fact that, unlike most legal
dramas, _Suits_ rarely ends up in a courtroom.

The catch: One of these hard-charging lawyers, bushy-tailed eager
beaver Mike Ross, apprentice to the dashing artful dodger Harvey
Specter, isn’t actually an attorney at all.

In the other corner, we have _Suits_, seasons five through eight
(just ignore season nine and the short-lived one-season
spinoff, _Pearson_
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neither of which is included on Netflix where this culture-wide
rewatch is taking place): in which the show becomes self-aware,
jettisons the moral antipathy of previous seasons, and puts itself on
trial.

_Suits_ never got its cultural due during the nine seasons it aired
on the USA network. Until 2023, its main claim to fame was boosting
the career of one-time princess Meghan Markle
[[link removed]].
Yet it currently stands poised to become Netflix’s biggest streaming
hit of all time, after a viral TikTok video
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made the rounds in May sparked renewed interest in the show — which
has since been setting streaming records so wild
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sound like they’re completely made up.

The TikTok clip showcases the key scene of the entire show: The moment
Harvey (Gabriel Macht) and Mike (Patrick J. Adams) meet, and Harvey
falls in love at first recitation with Mike, his polymath brain, and
his photographic memory. Although Mike is a dropout bike messenger
who’s literally in the middle of running a drug deal when they meet,
Harvey hires him on the spot to work for his law firm, Pearson. The
two of them construct an elaborate lie to create the illusion that
Mike graduated from Harvard Law. Harvey’s drive to keep Mike by his
side against all odds fuels the plot for most of the show’s
eight-year run.

_Suits_ may be the unexpected hit show of 2023, but it premiered in
2011, in a world that felt profoundly different from the one it
finished with, in 2019. The result is an odd little time capsule. Over
the course of the show, the world changed rapidly,
and _Suits_ responded to and evolved with that change — so much so
that we can follow the trajectory of our own cultural evolution within
its seasons. _Suits_ was born out of an era when nihilistic
absurdism dominated TV across a broad range of shows, from _Always
Sunny_ to _Scandal_. The oblivious ethos of that
early-season _Suits_ may be key to its renewed popularity:
Philosophically, it’s escapist comfort food mixed with geeky pop
culture refs and far too much reverence for Aaron Sorkin.

Yet it’s the latter era of the show that’s really
fascinating. _Suits_ was born out of a society that
memed performative uncaring
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and it was all too fun and silly to take seriously — until it
wasn’t. As it progressed, _Suits_ absorbed the ripples of
political and cultural unease that characterized the ’10s. In the
show’s highest-rated episode (per IMDb votes), “Faith,” Mike’s
childhood priest tells him that he might think of “God” as
“consequences.” _Suits_’ gods are capricious, but when they
demand tithes, a bitch better pay up.

_Suits_’ first half: A slick legal buddy drama that becomes an
epistemic looking-glass

_Suits_’ first half follows a law firm full of clearly drawn office
character tropes: no-nonsense boss Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres),
ultimate secretary Donna (Sarah Rafferty), volatile wannabe partner
Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), and long-suffering paralegal turned
ultimate girlfriend Rachel (Markle). They all have one thing in
common: Their lives revolve around the firm, eventually known as
Pearson Specter Litt, or PSL.

That means that whether they know it or not, their lives revolve
around keeping Mike’s secret. Despite the flimsiness of the premise
and the complete lack of logic about, well, anything, the first half
of _Suits_ fully milks the tension between Mike’s go-getter
enthusiasm for the law and the fact that he’s flagrantly breaking
it.

Between this (silly) high-stakes drama, _Suits_’ procedural formula
deals in high-powered pettiness. Each episode sees the firm defending
a shady corporation against another shady corporation, going back and
forth over a series of legal maneuverings that allow them to trade
quips and drop highly improbable interpretations of the law. Our
antiheroes usually finagle their way into some kind of moral high
ground, but not without stretching their credibility and our
credulity. This _Suits_ is a frothy treat in the pantheon of
self-serious legal dramas. And thanks to the increasingly outlandish
things Harvey and Mike do to get away with Mike’s crime, like
hacking the Harvard database and printing a fake Harvard degree, we
never have to take any of it too seriously.

Except then we do!

Season four begins a gradual tonal shift characterized by forewarnings
of disaster for the firm, as well as increased dysfunctionality among
the ensemble. The show’s blatantly antisemitic early-season
portrayal of Louis Litt actually gets worse for a while because
seasons four and five double down on all of his worst traits in the
name of drama. Those traits are all heinous stereotypes: Despite Rick
Hoffman’s best efforts at humanizing Louis, he’s mean-tempered,
buffoonish, weak, disloyal, effeminate, and selfish above all else.
The show presents him as spiteful and vindictive, a cheap, greedy,
money-hoarding backstabber who’s obsessed with power. At one point,
he plays the role of Shylock, as if the theme couldn’t get more
explicit. Any time the screws are put to him, Louis turns volatile and
vengeful. It’s a tired, troubling routine, and unfortunately, even
after the show writers finally realize what they’ve done and rapidly
rehabilitate his character in later seasons, the subtext that he could
be the firm’s weak link — more of an existential threat even than
Mike who’s _literally not a lawyer!_— never fully goes away.

Seasons five and six: The game changes

In season five, which aired in 2015–2016, the tonal change becomes
even more pronounced: Harvey, who’s hitherto prided himself on his
weaponized superficiality, starts going to therapy to deal with his
many abandonment issues. And someone finally prosecutes Mike for
fraud. This development forces _Suits_ into a much darker iteration
of its implied “ethics schmethics!” worldview. By the time Mike is
finally facing trial in the latter half of season five, he and Harvey
have gone from season one lawyers (and “lawyers”) who proudly draw
their moral lines and refuse to cross them to people willing to commit
blackmail, forgery, perjury, and beyond. “Do whatever you have to
do,” Harvey tells Mike as they get more and more desperate to avoid
prison. “Just don’t get caught.”

However, any time Mike and Harvey use their typical tactics —
strong-arming, bargaining, one-upmanship — to shut down the case,
opposing prosecuting attorney Gibbs (Leslie Hope) surmounts them by
relying on the unshakeable truth: Mike isn’t a lawyer. Mike isn’t
a lawyer! Yet one by one, all the other players at Pearson Specter
line up behind him, committing to performing the lie that he is. The
world of that lie keeps expanding; by the time Mike is finally
exposed, no fewer than 13 recurring cast members know he never went to
Harvard and are casually walking around covering for him.

_Suits_ thus becomes an apt and revealing, if entirely unwitting,
metaphor for the broader epistemic crisis
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come to define much of the modern age, in which people who are
otherwise rational find themselves moving in an entirely different
version of reality, from climate change denialism to Covid skepticism
to the factual outcome of elections. Just as many of Trump’s
supporters started out
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extremist nonsense for laughs yet wound up believing their own
rhetoric, Mike and Harvey, who get together initially almost as a
troll, ultimately come to believe their own reality distortion.

Mike becomes so convinced that he’s an actual lawyer that he tries
to take on a new case while he is on trial for pretending to be a
lawyer. Every time he careens into the fact that no one will testify
to knowing him at Harvard because no one knew him because he never
went to Harvard, he reacts with a dazed headshake, as though he
can’t quite believe they’re inconveniencing him by refusing to
help him bend the truth. It’s difficult to watch him spend the back
half of season five frantically trying and failing to coerce, beg,
extort, and bribe witnesses to help him without being reminded of
Trump asking the Georgia Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes
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For all the writers clearly want us to root for Harvey and Mike to
agree that Mike is, as one client’s mother insists, “innocent in
[his] heart,” it’s harder for a post-Trump audience to do that
than it would be for the sweet summer children of the Obama era.
Harvey and Mike might deserve mercy after their sins have been
acknowledged and confessed. But innocent they are not —
and _Suits_, for its first six seasons, isn’t interested in
rehabilitating them. It only takes them a few episodes after Harvey
finally engineers an early prison release for Mike in season six
before the two of them are back to doing highly unethical things to
get what they want.

_Suits_ tries to create a world where the law isn’t reality because
it can always be manipulated for the right price. The show wants us to
believe that since everyone in this universe is cutthroat and amoral
by default, these guys are heroic for at least trying to do the right
thing some of the time — except when they don’t. In other words,
it’s vibes, not truth, that really matter.

Which makes its entire abrupt turnaround in season seven such an
interesting reveal — not for what it says
about _Suits _but_ _what it says about the rest of us.

Season seven of _Suits_ tries to right its wrongs

Throughout _Suits_’ first six seasons, its characters are
essentially caricatures whose relationships with themselves and each
other are mainly shallow and undeveloped. The show’s female
characters suffer the most from this underwritten tendency,
particularly Gina Torres’ Jessica, who never really gets to be more
than a plot device. (Torres captained a spinoff, _Pearson_, launched
from _Suits_’ seventh-season finale, but it only lasted a single
season, and it’s hard not to wonder if that was partly because the
writers had so little to build on.) And though the show lives and dies
with the lighthearted chemistry between Mike and Harvey, not even
Gabriel Macht’s deep commitment to sending flirtatious smiles in
Adams’s direction can fully convince us that Mike deserves to be
where he’s at.

Season seven’s writers seem to have realized all of this abruptly.
(It’s probably no coincidence it was the first full season to follow
the 2016 election.) Once it has straightened out the giant plot
wrinkle it started with, the show goes full-throttle redemption arc,
working overtime to deepen its characters and repair all of its
negatives at once. Newly born again and (somehow) (nonsensically)
admitted to the bar for real-real, Mike begins tackling large-scale
pro bono cases with a social justice edge. Louis, we learn, has
actually been in therapy all along; the show fast-tracks him through a
personal growth arc that sees him almost instantly learning to put
other people before himself. Donna, whose whole character til now has
been “being loyal to Harvey,” suddenly gets dreams and lines like,
“I think I regret putting Harvey over myself.” Season seven
can’t stop telling you how feminist it is: “A man can’t swing a
dead cat around here without hitting a strong-willed woman,”
Rachel’s father says at one point.

When, in the seventh-season finale, Mike finally tells Harvey, “This
is who I am, it’s who I’ve always been” — meaning that he’s
an ethical do-good lawyer who only wants to take pro-bono work for the
betterment of humanity — Harvey is too good to remind him what a
giant retcon this is, for both him and for _Suits_.

It helps that the show doesn’t have to keep Mike on the straight and
narrow for long: Instead, it gives Mike and Rachel a season seven
finale send-off, providing them both with a chance to sail into the
sunset as pro-bono lawyers. (Rachel’s fictional wedding aired in
April 2018, just three weeks before Markle’s actual fairy tale
wedding.) That send-off also doubles as another reset: As season eight
rolls around, the remaining crew is right back to corporate schemes
and stratagems, now headed up by Rachel’s dad (Wendell Pierce), who
manages to be both fun and terrifying as the new top brass.
Still, _Suits_, now self-aware, can never completely retreat into its
former malaise of substituting movie quotes and pop culture cred for
human connection and empathy.

By the show’s end, it’s all grown up; and if we all liked it a
little better when it was younger, obnoxious, and oblivious — well,
perhaps we all liked ourselves a little better in 2011, too.

* suits
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* post truth
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* The 2010s
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* nihilistic absurdism
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* zeitgeist
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* epistemic crisis
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