What does a television show do when its original premise has been resolved? That is the dilemma currently facing USA’s legal drama Suits, which began its seventh season last week. Suits’s original log line was that a genius is hired as a lawyer at a major New York firm despite not having taken the bar exam or having gone to law school. Keeping this secret quiet was one of the show’s central storylines for years. But now that the secret is out in the open, what is Suits going to do? (Because Suits airs on Wednesday night, this review contains spoilers only up through last week’s premiere).
When we last left our friends with small computers, Mike Ross had just prevailed in his character and fitness examination for admission to the New York bar despite the fact that he served jail time for fraud. After spending the second half of last season working in a legal clinic, he agreed to rejoin Pearson Specter Litt as a partner with half his cases pro bono. As this season opens, Mike awkwardly quits the legal clinic, attempting to assuage his guilt by offering a $500,000 donation. But despite Mike’s goal to take cases pro bono, Mike’s first task while back at his old job is to help Harvey Specter in the sale of a vodka business.
Harvey, Mike, and Louis Litt are usually litigators, so it always confuses me when they wade into the world of transactional law. Harvey and Mike take the lead in setting up a wildly expensive party (I’m sure the client was thrilled) for interested bidders, and later negotiate with the potential counterparties. This storyline was a bit of a bore and completely out of touch with reality (I’m not a transactional lawyer, but I got the sense that it is a little less glamorous than Suits made it out to be), but it allows Mike to feel some deserved guilt from his former clinic co-worker for immediately wading back into the world of corporate law.
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Harvey is using the vodka sale to forget about all the fact that he has big shoes to fill now that former Managing Partner Jessica Pearson left the firm to move to Chicago (so that actress Gina Torres could move to ABC’s The Catch . . . which was promptly cancelled). But the stress is getting to him. He has not yet told Louis that he will be the managing partner. He ignores the fact that Louis is insulting associates and risking a sexual harassment lawsuit. And he barely humors Donna on her request to be made a senior partner. Instead, Harvey goes and finds his old therapist from a few seasons ago and asks her out. When we last saw Harvey’s therapist, I predicted that they would commence a romantic relationship (I’ve watched enough television to know); things just took longer than expected. But the date goes disastrously; Harvey wants free therapy, not a romantic partner.
Exploring Harvey’s struggles in managing the entire firm could be interesting new material for the show to tackle. But it was a misstep for Harvey to be completely oblivious to everything going on around him at Pearson Specter Litt, such that he seems totally unqualified to be managing partner. From the previews, it is evident that Gina Torres will back later in the season in some capacity, so that will hopefully spice up this storyline.
Louis is reeling from his breakup at the end of last season, and he takes it out on the associates. After telling an army of associates that they will have to stay in the office fall day for multiple weeks on end to work on his brief (seriously, how long could this brief possibly be that it requires the assistance of over a dozen associates working day and night for weeks?), he excoriates one associate who asks for two days off for paternity leave and then insults another associate’s sex life. He then fights with Rachel when she suggests that she be “in charge” of the associates instead of Louis.
As I’ve written about before, I think Louis is most effective when he is competent, not a doofus or a screaming maniac (indeed Rick Hoffman did excellent work last season as Louis was navigating the treacherous waters of being in an otherwise healthy relationship with a woman who was about to have a baby fathered by another man). This version of Louis just isn’t interesting to me. It also led to some clunky lines of dialogue, such as Louis claiming that overseeing the associates at the firm is akin to having children.
Finally, for most of last season, Donna was saddled with a thankless plotline in which she helped co-create “The Donna,” a digital assistant that she pitched to investors; I described it as a bad Black Mirror episode. Thankfully, there is no mention of “The Donna” in the season premiere. Instead, and perhaps even more ludicrously, she asks Harvey to make her senior partner.
Obviously Donna is extremely proficient, and as Harvey concedes, the office does not run without her. But (and I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong) in New York a non-lawyer cannot be a partner in a law firm. As Donna notes, non-lawyers are frequently hired as COOs (or the equivalent position) at law firms. So why didn’t Suits have Donna ask to be COO instead of partner? That would have mirrored the similar rise of Joan Holloway on Mad Men. But asking to become a partner when it’s obviously against the rules makes the show lose credibility.
With not a lot else going on this summer, I will definitely return to Suits a few times to see how it handles losing its central premise. Maybe it will pivot and turn into a Shark Tank-like show in which venture capitalists invest in digital recreations of Suits characters like “The Donna.”
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 [email protected]. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.