Why Is Everybody Watching ‘Suits’?
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“Excuse me, that isn’t … is that … Suits?”
This was me at the barbershop a few Saturdays ago. I was fifth in line for a haircut and trying to focus on my new library book, but my attention kept being drawn to the TV set, which was not only showing the legal drama, which ran from 2011-19 on USA, but showing its very first episode. Though I didn’t watch the series for long, I remembered that debut very well, having reviewed it a dozen years and several websites ago. So every time I tried turning my focus back to my book, I would get distracted by various plot points and whether I could remember what happened next. Finally, when it was my turn in the chair, I asked my stylist why she had put it on.
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“I don’t know,” she admitted. “It was on top of the app when I opened up Netflix, so I figured I would give it a try.” We then spent most of the cut discussing the life and career of Meghan Markle, who spent seven seasons on the show before marrying Prince Harry. On my way out the door, I took one last look at the screen, where Markle’s ace paralegal Rachel was having her first meeting with Patrick J. Adams’ fake attorney Mike, and marveled at how odd it was to encounter this show again in this context.
As it turns out, my stylist was far from the only person to recently stream the adventures of Rachel, Mike, and Gabriel Macht’s Harvey. Suits has improbably turned out to be the TV show of the summer. It has topped the Nielsen streaming charts for the last month, and broken records for Netflix as its most-watched acquired title in a given week — and this is a streamer whose library at various points included The Office, Breaking Bad, Friends, and many more huge hits from TV’s past.
So how exactly has Suits pushed itself to the top of Peak TV at the moment? It’s a perplexing case in some ways, an obvious one in others.
Let’s start with Suits itself. The show was the last big success of USA’s “Blue Skies” era, where the basic cable channel became a TV powerhouse on the backs of lighthearted, easily digestible dramas like Monk, Burn Notice, and White Collar. It took one of TV’s oldest and most durable formats, the legal drama, and grafted on a twist: What if one of our heroes had never actually graduated law school (or even college), but was so smart that he could fake his way through it? The gimmick was a double-edged sword for the show. Mike’s deep, dark secret made Suits distinct from dozens of other courtroom stories, but it was so scandalous that it often overwhelmed the actual strength of the series, which was the banter between Adams and Macht (and between some combination of them, Markle, Gina Torres, and Rick Hoffman), and seeing the kinds of barely-legal chicanery Mike and Harvey would pull for the good of their clients. Not a great show by any means, but plenty entertaining when it stayed out of its own way. And, like the other Blue Skies dramas, it’s a perfect second-screen experience, allowing viewers to easily get other things done at the same time that Harvey and Mike are swapping insults or Hoffman’s Louis is blowing a gasket about another piece of disrespect.
On that level, the show’s afterlife as a Netflix sensation shouldn’t be that surprising. There is always a demand for this kind of pleasant, passive viewing experience, and at times more demand than the industry is willing to supply. Most of Netflix’s original series are intensely serialized, demanding your attention from one plot point to the next, whether or not the individual points are interesting. Suits is very lightly serialized, as conflicts continue regarding Mike’s secret, Harvey jockeying for position at the firm, and various relationships, but a whole lot of it is the sort of Case of the Week stuff TV has been doing since the medium existed. It’s the sort of series Netflix has largely resisted making for itself, but that its subscribers clearly crave.
It’s not just about the relatively self-contained ease of the storytelling that sets Suits apart from the stuff Netflix makes for itself. Where most Netflix series these days are lucky to get two or three seasons of eight to 10 episodes apiece, Suits produced 134 episodes over nine seasons (the first eight of which are on Netflix, due to odd streaming rights we’ll get back to in a minute). There is simply a whole lot of Suits to watch for anyone interested. For all that we talk about the streaming era kicking off with the 2013 debuts of House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, Netflix built its huge subscriber base on the backs of library titles that, in either the broadcast network or cable ecosystems, ran for many, many years, with episode counts in the triple digits. While Netflix originals keep trending toward shorter seasons and shorter runs, the audience clearly likes having shows they can watch for a very long stretch of time without running out.
Again, it’s so odd to see how audience behavior seems at odds with what these companies want to keep making, but Netflix is not the first distributor associated with Suits to try to avoid giving the people what they want. In 2015, Mr. Robot debuted to rave reviews and massive online buzz, and even though its audience was a fraction of what the bigger Blue Skies shows had been doing, USA almost immediately pivoted in the new show’s dark, edgy direction, to absolutely zero commercial success. Walter White envy is one hell of a drug, you know?
But, again, why Suits? Why now? The series had already been streaming in its entirety for a while on Peacock, while the ninth season is available on Prime Video. (Which is presumably the reason Netflix doesn’t have it; streaming rights are weird.) The answer, I think, gets back to my stylist’s explanation for why she put it on that morning: It was there at the top of the app when she turned it on. In streaming, there is still Netflix and then there is everyone else. And there is the priceless real estate as the promoted show or movie on the app, and then there is everything else even on Netflix. Peacock, though it has a good library (and some excellent originals like Poker Face), just doesn’t have the omnipresence in our lives to make a library title go viral. Even Hulu (which has Burn Notice and White Collar) doesn’t, and also has such a confusingly-designed interface that few would even notice anything getting a big promotional push. Netflix, on the other hand, is everywhere, and at a certain point this must have all snowballed: People start watching Suits, leading to them telling their friends that they’re watching Suits, leading to articles (like this one) about how many people are watching Suits, leading to even more people watching Suits, and on and on. It’s a quieter than usual TV summer, even at Netflix, as everyone has spaced out their premieres to account for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Something was going to soak up all the attention. Why not the final acting showcase for the future Duchess of Sussex?
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