MY BAD

Disastrous Drama Spinoff’s Lead Takes Blame for Cancellation

“Anything that ends not on your terms is a failure,” the actor said.

Suits LA, the West Coast spinoff of the popular legal drama Suits, was canceled before its first season finished.

“It wasn’t good enough,” the show’s lead actor, Stephen Amell, admitted on Tuesday. “Ultimately, it’s a failure. I think that anything that ends not on your terms is a failure.”

Amell, 44, who rose to fame through his leading role on the CW show Arrow, took the blame for the NBC show’s cancellation after just one season.

“Whatever problem you have with the show, because I think that there were issues, it’s my job to solve those, to smooth them over, to gloss them up with some type of performance or something tangible,” Amell told Michael Rosenbaum on his podcast Inside of You.

Suits originally ran for 9 seasons on NBC from 2011 to 2019, but reached record-breaking viewership once it began streaming on Netflix and Peacock in 2023—partially due to the rising profile of its star, Meghan Markle.

The West Coast spinoff sought to capitalize on the resurgent audience and was thought to be an guarunteed success.

Amell said that it was his responsibility to use his charisma to fix the show’s problems.

“And I didn’t do that,” he continued. “I didn’t find anything ultimately with Ted Black, that character, that translated, that smoothed those things over and gave us a chance to keep going.”

“If it’s successful, I’m going to get a disproportionate amount of the credit, so I think it’s only fair that I stand in front and I take the blame,” he added.

Despite guest appearances by main Suits actors, including leading lawyers Gabriel Macht and Rick Hoffman, the show failed to garner steady viewership.

Last May, NBC said it shelved the show due to “not really showing the potential to grow.”

Amell admits there were signs from the outset that it might not make it to a second season.

Suits LA‘s showrunner, Aaron Korsh, told Amell while editing the show’s pilot that he didn’t “know if this is going to work.” According to the show’s lead, Korsh was struggling to incorporate NBC’s notes.

“A lot of what he wanted to do seemed to run up against what the network wanted,” he said.

Suits LA is the second spinoff of the highly watched legal drama. In 2019, NBC tried to create a show around one of the firm’s senior partners, Jessica Pearson. NBC canceled the Gina Torres-led spinoff after just one season, as its viewership barely scraped half of its predecessor’s final season.

Amell, who said that the show had been a “perfect gig,” was notified of the show’s cancellation a day after his birthday, before the season finale even aired.

Despite its cancellation, Amell says Suits LA, which he joked was the 133rd-ranked show out of 132, wasn’t a total failure.

“The ironic thing—maybe it’s ironic, I don’t know—is that it was such a wonderful experience tip to tail," he told Rosenbaum.

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Owen Mason-HillEditorial intern, Obsessed

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