Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for the Suits LA series finale.It’s already time to say goodbye to Suits LA. While it wasn’t shocking news that NBC decided not to pursue a second season of the legal drama, it is bittersweet that it never felt like Suits LA never reached its full potential. It showed signs of real promise over the course of the 13-episode first season, especially after a very rocky start, but it was never able to fully capture the magic of the flagship series.
The show was always fighting a losing battle. It was greenlit during the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 when the original Suits was doing absolute gangbusters on streaming services. The idea was for a new series to bring in that level of excitement, or at least be in the ballpark to justify NBC’s investment in the project. But Stephen Amell was never going to match the moxie and charisma of Gabriel Macht’s Harvey Specter. It was too Herculean a task for anyone, but Amell gave it a good old college try; he just wasn’t assisted on the page.
Suits LA didn’t know what it wanted to be for the first third of the season, which is too long of an identity crisis in the still overly crowded landscape. Even when it laid off the gritty mob drama and focused on office politics, there was still everything and the kitchen sink competing for camera time. Even the final episode proves that the Suits LA creative team never figured out exactly what to cut back and what parts of the show to let shine. We get answers to lingering questions in the finale and some closed loopholes, as well as a decent idea of where Season 2 would have been heading. However, like most of the season, the Suits LA finale was fine — and it also could have been a lot better.
‘Suits LA’ Gives Us One More New York Flashback for the Road

Image via NBC

The most annoying part of this show plagued me until the very last episode. We tracked Ted through his life-and-career-altering final case as a federal prosecutor in New York throughout the season. Even though his tango with mob boss Pellegrini (Anthony Azizi) ended in Episode 9, the end of the trial didn’t actually explain what sent Ted to Los Angeles or how Pellegrini pulled off killing Ted’s big brother Eddie (Carson A. Egan).
The finale takes us to the night before Ted’s father (Matt Letscher) is set to report to prison for his own Pellegrini dealings. It’s supposed to be a boys’ night with dad and both of his sons, but at the last minute, Ted’s dad asks for a solo dinner with Ted. The lawyer reluctantly agrees, even though he’s only going to the dinner in the first place to support Eddie. The latter pushes the pair to go without him, and they share a cordial, borderline-healing dinner together until Ted gets a phone call from Kevin (Troy Winbush) that Pellegrini has a hit out on him and he needs to leave his apartment. Ted rushes back to his place right as Kevin pulls up, but they’re too late. The apartment explodes with Eddie inside watching TV, and Ted collapses.
The problem is that we already knew everything about this situation from all the exposition in the early part of the season. We know that Ted’s father knew about the hit and lured him out of the apartment, sacrificing Eddie to Pellegrino’s hitman. We suspected that Kevin was kicked out of the FBI in retaliation. We know Ted stopped talking to Kevin after the explosion. And while Ted formally apologized for holding Eddie’s death over Kevin, they had already mended old wounds when Ted offered Kevin a job at the law firm.
This flashback was designed to close a loop, but there was nothing in this third of the episode that the audience didn’t already know. There was no new information or a different perspective on what we had heard about all season. It was an energy-suck to watch this thing play out when we knew for 12 episodes exactly how it played out, and that time could have been used for something more fulfilling for the audience. Or the writers should have held back on the earlier details so this finale flashback felt like more of a reveal. Instead, it was treading water when it felt like even the characters had already moved on.
Ted and Samantha Team Up To Put a Monster in Jail in the ‘Suits LA’ Series Finale

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The flashbacks would’ve been better if they had been focused on Rosalyn (Azita Ghanizada), Ted’s sharp-mouthed secretary, who became the focal point of the case of the week. She used to work for a sadistic Hollywood producer, Avery Jeffers (played by Mike O’Malley with a literal Looney Toons-esque villain mustache), before Ted rescued her and put her on his desk. Meanwhile, Samantha (Rachelle Goulding) has a client who reported Avery for abusive behavior on the set of his latest project and was subsequently blackballed for trying to stand up for herself and the crew. She calls Ted to round up any clients who would join a class action to take down Avery once and for all. Ted won’t take it to his clients, but he does get Rosalyn to give him and Samantha a list of names of people she used to work with who would be willing to participate in the suit.

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Unfortunately, Avery is as connected as they feared. He finds out who they targeted and threatens them out of helping with the lawsuit. A second round of participants worked directly for the studio instead of Avery, making him not directly liable for their complaints. Ted has to go back to Rosalyn for help after swearing that she wouldn’t have to face the man who tormented her again. Rosalyn reveals that Avery wasn’t just a horrible boss, but he also sexually assaulted her one night at the office. Luckily, Rosalyn had convinced Ted to hire the one person she told about the attack at the time — the Black and Associates head of HR, Marvin (Rich Sommer). Marvin had Rosalyn’s corroborating statement, along with every complaint against Avery that an employee had made while Marvin worked for him.
With the new evidence, and a power play from Elizabeth Smith (Sofia Pernas), Ted and Samantha are able to coerce Avery into resigning as the CEO of his production company and essentially promise to never work again. A victory for everyone involved! But it would have been more powerful to get a fuller backstory for Rosalyn instead of having her give her verbal exposition to Ted in the office kitchen.
Rick and Erica Finally Figure Things Out in the ‘Suits LA’ Series Finale

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Rick (Bryan Greenberg) and Erica (Lex Scott Davis) are up to their usual tricks in the finale. This time, they’re fighting over actress Dylan Prior (Victoria Justice), and her profit share in the movie Rick and Ted helped her land in the penultimate episode. Erica’s job is to stop Dylan from taking any of Ted’s client’s points on the backend, which means going toe-to-toe with Rick. That’s messy because Dylan kissed Rick at the end of the penultimate episode, and then he told her he couldn’t pursue anything physical with her. That would be inappropriate as her lawyer! So Dylan takes matters into her own hands and offers to sign with Erica to free her and Rick up to pursue whatever was happening between them.
The issue is that professionalism isn’t the only reason Rick turned Dylan down. He is still hung up on Erica and isn’t ready to move on to a new relationship yet. Those mixed feelings make the negotiations over the movie contracts extremely awkward and personal. Luckily, Rick is able to dig himself out of his own hole by getting Dylan her profit-share out of the movie producer’s cut of the film. If there had been a Suits LA Season 2, the filming of that movie would’ve been a huge problem because Rick screws over that producer two episodes in a row. There’s no way she wasn’t going to take that out on Dylan on set.
Rick comes clean about his true reasons for turning Dylan down, and so she decides to stay on his client. Erica assumes that Dylan’s cold feet about signing with her must have been due to Rick bad-mouthing her. She goes over to his apartment to confront him, but when the truth came out, they end up making out instead. The sexual tension between these two has been simmering all season, so it was nice to see them finally work it out before the show ended.
‘Suits LA’ Teases a Messy Love Triangle We’ll Never See

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If there had been a Suits LA Season 2, then Erica and Rick would’ve woken up the morning after their reunion to the news that they’re now co-workers. Stuart (Josh McDermitt) and Samantha offer Ted the merger that was supposed to happen in the pilot before Stuart stabbed Ted in the back. The second season ostensibly was going to have all the lawyers working together under one roof, which was basically what they were doing all season but with a few metaphorical pissing contests in between.
Before Ted can agree to go through with the merger, he needs to check with Samantha about her feelings for him. She implies during their work on the Jeffers case that she’s fallen for him again. That’s an intriguing prospect, but Amanda Stevens (Maggie Grace) also tells Ted that she was hasty when she said she couldn’t handle being the head of criminal defense and dating him at the same time. Samantha already knows that there’s a flirtation between Ted and Amanda, and she declares that she doesn’t care. They could merge the companies, and she wouldn’t mind if things got messy on the personal front.
Oh gosh darn, I guess that means fans will miss out on more Ted threesome dreams since there’s no Season 2. I would have genuinely loved to see what Amanda’s reaction was to finding out Ted expected her to compete with her boss for a man once she found out about the merger. We do get to skip out on Stuart and Amanda battling over who headed up the criminal division (where you know Stuart would have been incredibly annoying). We’ll also miss Rick and Erica reigniting their battle for Head of Entertainment. There was going to be a lot more squabbling in Season 2, so maybe we dodged a bullet? The biggest shame is that we never got to see Suits LA attempt to get Denzel Washington on the show.
Suits LA is now available to stream on Peacock.

Suits LA

Suits LA delivers a mid series finale to a mid show.

Release Date

February 23, 2025

Network

NBC

Writers

Aaron Korsh

Pros & Cons

Erica and Rick finally getting on the same page is such a relief.
Always let Mike O’Malley chew up the scenery!
YES to giving Rosalyn more to do than babysit Ted and Leah.

A pointless New York flashback has no revelations.
Ted apologizes to people he’s already apologized to for the same reason.
Screwing over the female producer twice feels kind of crappy.