All of these shows have long been off the air, but "Suits" has retained a spot in the public eye for, realistically, two reasons: One, Meghan Markle was on it before she married a prince. And two, the show became one of Netflix's most-streamed shows once it debuted there. Into this hotbed of interest comes "Suits LA," debuting Sunday at 9 p.m. on NBC, a similarly named but opaquely connected new series...about handsome guys in suits being legal whizzes.
"Suits LA," as might be expected from its very clear title, moves the action from glossy high-rise offices in New York to glossy high-rise offices in LA. This time, the series focuses on Ted Black, an entertainment lawyer played by Stephen Amell, lately of the CW superhero series "Arrow." He is so similar in appearance to Macht, who starred as Harvey Specter in the original show, that when one scene featured a picture of the two of them together, I couldn't immediately identify each of them in the photo. (The show is coy about how they know each other, at least in the first three episodes.)
Ted runs a firm that focuses on both entertainment law and criminal defense alongside his longtime friend, Stu (Josh McDermitt). As the series begins, the duo is navigating a merger with another big firm. Meanwhile Ted is trying to decide who to make head of entertainment law: Rick (Bryan Greenberg), whose gentle manner could help him win cases, but could also indicate a lack of killer instinct; or Erica (Lex Scott Davis), who is all killer instinct.
He and Rick are also quite friendly, a dynamic that suggests but never quite lands the idea that a good-old-boys network is preventing Erica, a Black woman, from succeeding at the firm. Amell is a charismatic performer, but in the early going Ted is a collection of traits more so than a character: arrogant, talented, concealing a deep inner pain, ambitious.
He's also a former federal prosecutor, constantly voicing the opinion that defense attorneys exist solely to keep bad guys out of prison. It plays very bizarrely in a country where miscarriages of justice are so well-known that even the most recent Marvel movie, "Captain America: Brave New World," featured a plotline about a man who was unjustly imprisoned for decades. Ted has reasons both professional and personal to dislike criminals, but it's a strangely one-note stance that he repeats far too often. We all have our bugaboos, but he brings it up so often that the opinion starts to feel unnaturally wedged in as a character detail.
Should you watch it? Here's where I admit that I've only seen the pilot of the original "Suits," so it's hard for me to say if this one satisfies for similar reasons. As a standalone show, it did improve over the course of the first few episodes, though it's also spending too much time flashing back to 2010 to revisit a case that we can predict will propel Ted from federal prosecutor to entertainment lawyer. He also lacks a foil like Adams's Mike (so far), which ends up burdening him with too much of the emotional narrative.
Still, if what you like is smart, well-dressed lawyers constantly one-upping each other, you'll find that here. USA's Blue Sky era was not wrong -- there will always be an appetite for shows like this one, and it's a relief to watch a show not overburdened with a season-long mystery, or celebs hunting for an Emmy.
SUITS LA
Starring: Stephen Amell, Josh McDermitt, Bryan Greenberg, Lex Scott Davis. On NBC and Peacock.