No one had Suits (2011-19) being the hit show of 2023, but after it was, very few would have had the inevitable spinoff, Suits LA, canceled weeks before even finishing out its first season.
Suits LA was unceremoniously thrown on the NBC scrap heap Friday, along with four other series: Lopez vs. Lopez, Night Court, The Irrational and Found. The broadcast network had to clean house for the return of the NBA to its airwaves.
But if any of those five were hits, NBC executives would have found a time slot.
“It’s so hard to talk about shows and which ones you bring back,” Jeff Bader, NBC’s president of programming strategy, said on a conference call with media the following day. “Suits (LA) has had a very short run, but it really just has not resonated the way we thought it would. There can be many, many reasons — people are speculating why it hasn’t resonated, but it’s just not really showing the potential to grow for us in the future, unfortunately.”
“Those are the decisions we have to make,” Bader continued. “We have to look at the performance of the shows both on linear and on digital. We have to see the ones that look like they have growth potential in the future. So we’re looking at how stable they are in their linear performance, how stable they are on digital, which ones are growing, which ones are declining — and we had to make some hard decisions.”
Bader said he and NBC’s other decision makers discussed moving any and all of those canceled shows — including Suits LA — to Peacock. Five passes, we guess. NBC hasn’t moved a show from broadcast to Peacock since Law & Order: Organized Crime last year. Grosse Pointe Garden Society still may make the jump.
Suits LA has now aired 12 episodes with the season one (and now series) finale still on the way this coming Sunday. Suits LA brought back original Suits stars Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter and David Costabile as Daniel Hardman; as of Sunday night, Rick Hoffman has returned as Louis Litt for the final few episodes. But Suits LA really wanted to get its new attorneys, led by Stephen Amell as entertainment lawyer Ted, over with the audience.
The OG Suits did fine during its USA Network run, but the dramedy became a cultural phenomenon in June 2023 when Peacock first shared the streaming rights with Netflix. What followed was a first-place finish on Nielsen’s streaming charts for a record 12 straight weeks, surpassing Ozark.
NBC will host its annual upfront Monday morning at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.