By Mitch Huttema (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 7, 2015
Suits follows Mike Ross (Patrick Adams), a former drug-dealing university dropout with a photographic memory who manages to get into the world of Wall Street financial law. Mike is hired as associate for Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), a bad-boy big business lawyer who is impressed by Mike’s answers in an impromptu interview and hires him against the law.
What follows are several seasons of various characters bashing egos together and creating unnecessary and completely avoidable problems. And of course, don’t forget the classic sexual tension between every male and female in the cast that also plays a major role in those avoidable problems.
The opening minute or so in each episode recaps the past events and builds anticipation. I watched the show through several different websites, and I eventually lost track of where I was. It wasn’t until the fourth season that — after seeing a recap of a storyline I’d never seen before — I realized I’d skipped six episodes from the middle of the third season! I had managed nearly a whole season without it and not even noticed. It seems to me that this speaks to the quality of the narrative.
However, it was to my joy that I had the six episodes to enjoy anew, as I had finished everything and was waiting in eager anticipation for the next season. Despite the contrived storylines and egocentric characters, I had fallen in love with Suits. The series houses some of my most beloved television characters, and not without good reason. The show focuses on several characters interchangeably through the series, allowing the viewer to explore each character through their own perspective of themselves as well from other characters. From one point-of-view a certain character may be loveable, but from another they become vile.
It is the well-rounded presentation of each character that the viewer comes to know each of the characters’ many sides and so has the opportunity to love them. Despite the set-up drama and easily avoidable, ego-driven conundrums, Suits redeems itself by making the viewer actually care and feel for each of its characters. Because the viewer invests emotion into the characters, the show has the power to drag you back again and again for more.
A word of advice: if you do not want to lose yourself to an all-night binge, avoid the last two minutes of every episode: it is in this time that an insurmountable problem arises every time, only to be solved in the first two minutes of the next episode. For some reason, though, it is still satisfying and works every time.
