Prisons, Television

Standard Of Review: Prison Is The New 'Suits'

In a show full of implausible plot points, these latest developments have to take the cake.

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Suits TV showThe second half of last season (the show’s fifth) was a turning points for Suits, as (spoiler alert) Mike Ross goes to prison, having made a deal with AUSA Anita Gibbs to take the fall for his fraud in practicing law without a degree. With its central hook no longer a secret, I wondered how Suits could possibly move forward as a sustainable show. The first two episodes of Suits’s sixth season attempt to do just that, with mixed results (as with previous seasons, due to the fact that Suits airs on Wednesday, these reviews are a week behind, so this column contains spoilers through the first two episodes of the season).

As the season begins, Mike enters Danbury federal prison for a two-year sentence. Setting a show in a prison in the age of Orange Is The New Black is a risky move. Because audiences now know so much about life in a federal prison, Mike sounds like a moron when he acts like he is going to summer camp, such as imploring a guard to allow him to make a phone call to his fiancée Rachel. The guard rightly puts Mike in his place.

When Mike reaches his cell, he initially bonds with his cellmate Frank Gallo (Paul Schulze), a seemingly kind and patient man who listens when Mike tells him his sob story and allows him to use his contraband cellphone to call Rachel. But in a nice twist, it turns out that Frank is not Mike’s cellmate after all, and is instead a prison kingpin who has made it his life’s mission to get revenge on Harvey Specter for putting Frank away for racketeering when Harvey was an ADA (given that Harvey was an ADA and not an AUSA, I assume Harvey prosecuted Frank under a state racketeering statute, so I am not sure how he ended up in federal prison, but ok). Once Frank reveals his true purpose, he uses the phone to send texts to Rachel, instigates a fight with Mike by pretending that he is disseminating racy pictures of Rachel, and then unsuccessfully tries to stab Mike in the stomach.

I will admit that I did not predict the twist of Frank being a villain. In fact, I had been ready to criticize the show for making Mike’s prison life so easy by giving him the world’s best cellmate. Schulze is a solid character actor, best known to me for playing Ryan Chappelle in early-season 24 (between Schulze this season and Leslie Hope last season, Suits is really getting a lot of mileage out of old 24 actors), and he is solid playing Frank as both friendly and menacing. My only issue with this plotline so far is that Frank’s plan is not particularly clear. First it appears that he only wants to screw with Mike. But then Frank tries to kill Mike quickly thereafter. What was the point of messing with Mike in the first place if Frank is just going to try and kill him so soon?

Meanwhile, things are not going much better at Pearson Specter Litt. At the end of the fifth season, Jessica, Harvey, and Louis discovered that the entire personnel of the firm was gone. In fact, the other partners “bifurcated” the firm and took the entire staff with them, except for Rachel, Donna, one IT guy and Louis’s secretary. In a show full of implausible plot points, this has to take the cake. How on earth did the remaining anonymous partners convince literally hundreds of people to leave their jobs in the course of a single afternoon? This is downright impossible. At many firms, it takes that long just to run a fire drill.

Next, Pearson Specter Litt is served with a putative class-action lawsuit alleging $100 million in damages with respect to every case on which Mike worked while at the firm. Due to the fact that the firm does not have enough money for a protracted legal battle, let alone to pay out a judgment, Jessica, Harvey, and Louis are able to use the threat of bankruptcy to extract a quick $10 million settlement with the class. In typically Suits fashion, this storyline moves at breakneck speed. In only a couple days, the firm is sued, comes to an agreement on a settlement, and then goes before the judge for a fairness hearing. This just would not happen in the real world. Under Supreme Court precedent, certification of a class for settlement purposes only still needs to meet the requirements under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 of predominance, adequacy of representation, etc. Thus, the settlement would take at least several weeks as the parties brief the issues and provide notice to potential class members. It is this extreme departure from realism that drives me crazy and makes me not enjoy this show.

I am still interested to see where Suits goes from here and whether Mike is going to spend the next two seasons in prison (I would bet a lot of money on “no”). I will likely write about the show a few times over the course of this half-season, particularly if more 24 actors appear (I can’t wait for the mountain lion that terrorized Kim Bauer in Season 2 to show up).

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Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at harrygraff19@gmail.com. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.

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