This week on TVOlogy, Summer TV Preview Week gives you an exclusive look at five of our favorite returning series. Here, Terron R. Moore discusses how Suits became USA's hit of the year, and how the season 2 premiere pushes it even further towards being one of the best shows on TV.
Summer TV Preview Week
True Blood (Monday) | Suits (Tuesday) | Futurama (Wednesday)
Awkward. (Thursday) | Degrassi (Friday)
The storybook bromance is no longer a fabled thing: the resurgence of boys lovin’ boys bein’ boys dates as far back as the days of Jackass, where an early-2000s ragtag gang of misfits came together to spend hours hot gluing each other’s nutsacks and sloshing poo all over one another. But in between the pranks and guffaws, there was a determined coda: shows centered around male relationships can be just as fun—if not more interesting and infinitely more hilarious—than male-female or female-female based programs; if the ladies had Sex and the City, we would have Entourage, our own version of idealized life on screen, and like it.
So with the revival of the TV bromance (see: Rob and Big, Franklin & Bash, New Girl), it’s refreshing to see Suits spin that on its head, giving it layers of weight and depth beyond typical dude comedy fare: it’s smoothly confident and effortlessly cool, yet not outlandish in the way Franklin overtly touts its leads as zany frat stars. Faux Harvard alum Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) and partner Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), bros as they may be, consistently have bigger fish to fry, and Suits intensely focuses on the ways in which they discover loopholes and use their lawyerin’ logic and smarts to close cases.
This is typical par for most smarmy white-guy dramas, but what makes Suits so damn good is that it’s got a great underdog in Patrick J. Adams as Mike Ross, probably the only character in all of Suits-dom still trying to do the right thing, a guy who hasn’t (yet) lost track of what that is. It’s stimulating to place him against the bigger wigs like Harvey and the likable-yet-repulsive Louis (Rick Hoffman), who are two engulfed in the laws of politics to separate right from wrong. Where in their world, the right thing is whatever gets the job done, Mike’s growth on the show will ostensibly involve shaking some of those morals loose; his honesty rarely does him any favors with the men or women in his life, and his desperate desire to stick to his roots only came back to destroy him, as his oldest friend vindictively sold him out at the season’s end.
But Thursday’s premiere, the cryptically-titled “She Knows”, is quite literally the best episode it could possibly be for a show returning to the small screen after months of leaving viewers on edge, not shying away from where last season’s cliffhangers left us—best friend Trevor (Tom Lipinski) exposing Mike to company partner Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres) while learning that he’s been seeing Jenny (Vanessa Ray), and Rachel (Meghan Markle) having to grapple with her growing feelings for Mike. Trevor did more than one revelation at the end of last season, however: he also spilled the beans to Jenny about Mike kissing Rachel, which will bring another major wedge in their already-complicated relationship. And Jessica learning about Mike’s big lie will definitely have dramatic consequences on both Mike and Harvey, but the surprising return of Daniel Hardman (David Costable), the namesake in Hardman/Pearson, will come under unusual circumstances and create an uneasy alliance between Jessica, Harvey, and Mike that will carry us through a good portion of the season.
“She Knows” also features a more vibrant Mike Ross, a version I like to affectionately call Funky Mike: he’s a dancin’, overconfident fool in the premiere, which ironically plays against a standout, nearly spine-tingling performance from Gina Torres as Jessica Pearson. The ante here is upped all around, and the show’s second season feels as it should: as if every facet of the show has been improved, every actor more confident in their roles, every character put on the edge. If Suits is a show about bros blindsiding bros, get ready for Season 2 to up that action times ten. But it’ll also show new sides of Harvey, including how fiercely defensive this supposedly heartless man can be of his protégée, and with Daniel Hardman back in the Hardman/Pearson mix, his development over the season might be the most interesting to watch of them all. This Thursday, Suit up.
Suits premieres Thursday, June 14th at 10pm on USA.
Tomorrow, Emily F. Cheever explains the spacey appeal of Comedy Central's animated wonder Futurama, with a look at the new season's first two episodes.
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Follow Terron R. Moore on Twitter: @cityfitch
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