TV

Now That It's Insanely Popular, Why Was Suits Canceled in the First Place?

Now That It's Insanely Popular, Why Was Suits Canceled in the First Place?
Image credit: USA Network

Suits is going through an unexpected Renaissance of its popularity in 2023, and this makes many people wonder: why was this phenomenal series ever canceled at all?

Suits, the lighthearted and fun TV show about a New York legal firm, had a great run back in the day. The show was quite popular among the audience, and everything was going well — until it didn’t. Suits was closed after Season 9, but the problems started earlier, around S6 and S7. Why did this successful show have to end then?

Well, it’s no one’s secret that Meghan Markle, one of the lead stars of Suits, became Prince Harry’s wife. Their relationship was already messing the show up a bit prior to the wedding, but then she had to leave altogether.

What most people don’t realize is that Markle was far from the only lead star to leave the series at the time, too.

“Right after we finished shooting Season 6, I went to the USA. At that time we only had the cast under contract until the end of Season 7. We had to figure out what to do, and we weren’t 100% sure what the cast wanted to do. We’d lost Gina [Torres] and we came up with a plan to extend the cast for two more years,” Suits’ creator Aaron Korsh told Deadline.

This was when it started: Gina Torres, the actress behind Jessica Pearson, left after S6, and Korsh already started having troubles. Then, things only got worse as with the next season, two more leading actors decided to call it quits and leave Suits — including Patrick J. Adams, the actor who played Mike.

“During the course of Season 7, as they were negotiating the cast’s contracts for two years, an unforeseen thing happened. You can never know that one of your stars is going to marry the Prince of England, and Patrick decided not to return, so we had a choice whether to keep going after Season 7,” Korsh continued.

In the end, after a long discussion, the team settled that they would finish the series after Season 9, as they initially intended. This was the right call, too: after Meghan Markle and Patrick J. Adams departed from the show, Suits took quite a hit in terms of popularity… Well, at least now the show is making up for that, right?

Source: Deadline