Suits LA Boss Talks Premiere’s Cataclysmic Split, That Twist Ending and Harvey’s Impending Arrival
Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Suits LA premiere. Proceed at your own risk!
Suits LA just got started on Sunday, and there’s already some major upheaval within the show’s entertainment and criminal law firm.
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Arrow vet Stephen Amell stars as Ted Black, a former federal prosecutor from New York who is blindsided when his friend and partner, criminal defense attorney Stuart Lane (The Walking Dead’s Josh McDermitt), pulls the rug out from underneath him by cutting Ted out of a merger and taking several of their employees and clients with him to his new gig (working alongside Ted’s ex-girlfriend!).
“I wanted the firm to change names in the very first episode because we did it so often in the original [series],” creator Aaron Korsh jokes to TVLine.
Kidding aside, Stuart’s betrayal sets up a dramatic start for the offshoot, and it’s only the beginning of the power plays: Stuart offers Black Lane Law’s Erica Rollins (The L Word: Generation Q’s Lex Scott Davis) — who’s competing with Rick Dodson (One Tree Hill’s Bryan Greenberg) for head of entertainment — a deal in which she would be his inside spy for six months, then he’ll promote her at his new firm. Erica doesn’t take it because she overheard during the hiring process that Stuart only wanted to give her diverse clients, while Ted believed in her potential. In return, Ted makes her not only head of entertainment, but also partner while he handles a murder case involving a producer client (Alias’ Kevin Weisman).
Ted really hates criminal defense attorneys, but he wants to stick to it Stuart more, so he takes on something he despises. And that is why Rick does, eventually, leave to work for Stuart even though Ted is his mentor.
Although Suits LA’s beginnings are far more adversarial than the USA Network drama’s, “the one thing that [this] show, I would say, has in common with the original is that, underneath, they all have affection for each other, no matter what,” Korsh says. “In the original Suits, we showed the love between them before the discord. But in this one, love still exists, we’re just meeting them in a different lifecycle of their firm. Ted says in the pilot, ‘Stuart was like a brother to me.’ There’s still underlying familial feelings between all these characters, and you’ll see it through the course of the year.”
Below, Korsh talks about the offshoot’s big split, the show’s flashback storyline and the episode-ending reveal that Ted’s brother Eddie is actually dead. The showrunner also teases what to expect from Suits star Gabriel Macht’s return as Harvey Specter.
TVLINE | You start this series with a pretty cataclysmic event, with Stuart betraying Ted and cutting him out of the merger, whereas the original Suits began with Harvey and Mike coming together. Why did you decide on this as a starting point for the new show?
I didn’t write this thing to be a Suits universe thing. It was just supposed to be its own thing at the time that I wrote it. So for whatever reason, when I was thinking about Ted’s past and his present, and thinking about the effect his father dying was going to have on his present, it just sort of seemed like the natural thing to have happen. And then when I looked at it in retrospect, and also after we made it sort of Suits, I realized that we’re just meeting this firm at a different place in its life cycle than when we met, obviously, Pearson Hardman. And I like that it’s different, but I didn’t set out to make it a splitting rather than a coming together. It just sort of worked out that way.
TVLINE | Ted is betrayed by not only Stuart, but he also loses Rick, who you could argue represents the most Harvey and Mike-esque relationship with Ted. So how is Ted handling those two betrayals?
It’s going to be a process for him to handle both those things throughout the course of the season. And absolutely, Rick leaving [is] more of his protégé leaving, and Stuart is more like his contemporary leaving. So they’re different, but I also feel like I don’t know if Ted understands this, but Stuart leaving was much more of a betrayal. Rick leaving is more like a gut-punch because Rick left a note. Rick wasn’t trying to betray Ted, he wasn’t trying to stab him in the back. He just felt like he had to do it. He sort of left gently, and Stuart left angrily. But throughout the course of the season, it might be sort of a two steps forward, one step backward, in terms of Ted accepting and handling both decisions of both the men to leave. Another way that Ted is handling the leaving of those two guys is he does have Erica. His relationship with Erica gets deeper because of it, and Kevin is going to come back. So he has other people in his support system that are going to help him manage.
TVLINE | Stuart mentions Ted calling him a flea a year ago. When will we get some insight into what happened back then that led, ultimately, to the split?
I don’t know that we definitely go back and revisit that exact incident, but the idea is that Ted calling Stuart the flea was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Ted was a prosecutor, so anybody that’s a criminal defense attorney, he doesn’t respect the job. So it was [the] years-long toll of him not respecting what Stuart did. And then when they were negotiating to merge, Ted felt like entertainment law was a much more valuable portion of the firm than criminal defense and publicly said, “Stuart’s a flea, and I’m aligning in terms of the value of the firm.” In Ted’s mind, he was just saying that to kind of say, “Therefore, when we merge, our firm should be valued more highly because maybe our entertainment division is stronger than yours.” But Stuart took it personally. I don’t know that we ever explicitly talk about it more, but now that you’re asking me this question, maybe we should.
TVLINE | Maybe a possible flashback?
The only thing is there’s so many flashbacks right now that are telling the story of when Ted left New York. It could be something we flashback in the future, or more likely, just have Stuart kind of talk about it with someone.
TVLINE | Are those flashbacks something that is in every episode throughout the season? And is the mystery in those flashbacks something that will be wrapped up this season?
[There are] four, maybe five, scenes of flashbacks per episode, and we’re, basically, telling the story of what happened in Ted’s last year in New York. What happened with investigating [the mobster] and trying to put him away, and what happened to Eddie, and what happened with his father. And yeah, we are going to try to wrap that up in the first season.
TVLINE | You mentioned Eddie. How much is his spirit going to haunt Ted, no pun intended?
[Laughs] Well, I don’t know if it’s haunting him, necessarily. It’s, to some degree, helping him. Eddie comes and goes from time to time. First of all, Eddie is alive and well in the flashback, so in some of the flashbacks, you’ll see Eddie, obviously, not as a spirit, but as an actual person. But it’s not really, to me, Eddie’s spirit. What Eddie really is in the present day, to me, is sort of Ted’s subconscious speaking to him. So Eddie is most often, in my mind, the voice of forgiveness. It’s Ted’s softer side that Ted might not be in touch with. So Eddie encourages him to maybe forgive his father, or maybe forgive Stuart, or whatever the case may be. But he appears at times throughout the season in the present day, and at times, throughout the season in the past.
TVLINE | Erica and Rick are now both heads of entertainment at different firms. How much does that put them in competition with each other still?
Episode 2 is going to put them in a little bit of a direct competition. There’s a little bit of twist with Rick’s head of entertainment situation, and he ends up going head-to-head with Erica to sort of prove his worth to the new firm. They had a complicated relationship when they worked together because they were rivals, but they were also colleagues. So they’ll have plenty of interaction throughout the season.
TVLINE | As you said, this wasn’t initially meant to be a Suits spinoff. Once it was going in that direction, how did you decide how much to reference the original Suits in this first episode? Because I don’t think there are any direct mentions of any characters in the premiere, if I’m not mistaken.
Well, here’s the thing: The first episode had been written before it was a Suits universe show… [These characters] live in Los Angeles. Who’s coming to LA? Why are they here? Our [original Suits] characters were not criminal defense attorneys, and they were not entertainment lawyers, so I felt like it would just be like kind of shoving a square peg in a round hole to put them in the pilot. That’s what I mean about I want to sort of establish this show as its own. And yes, it exist in the same universe, but you have to let this thing exist before you bring another character in. Otherwise, I’d be creating a show that’s just like, for some reason, Harvey, or Mike, or Louis, or whoever is just all of a sudden a lawyer in LA, and I didn’t want to redo the whole thing. So it didn’t make any sense for me to sort of integrate anything in the first episode.
However, once we came up with the idea of Harvey and Ted having history, what we did do when we shot the pilot — and this is before we knew Gabriel was going to agree to come on the show, and we always knew we could just take it out, not use this shot — but we put that picture [of Harvey and Ted] that you see in Episode 2. It is in the pilot. It’s in there behind Ted’s desk. … Then Episode 2 introduces the concept, explicitly, that Harvey and Ted were friends, and that Kevin knew Harvey, also. And then Harvey will show up in the past, and then he’ll show up in the past again, and then he shows up in the present.
TVLINE | Obviously, Harvey was your main character in the original Suits, but what made him the right character to bring in as Suits LA’s first original Suits alum?
Well, I think he was the clear and obvious choice… Ted was a prosecutor in New York at the time that Harvey was working in New York, so they, clearly, would’ve known each other. Now, they didn’t work in the same office. Ted was a U.S. Attorney, but Harvey was in the District Attorney’s office. So what I came up with was they both played in this prosecutors’ league baseball team. So it just made sense that they would know each other. To put other people in would be just much harder to figure out.
What did you think of Suits LA? Grade it below, then hit the comments!
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