Suits' final season, not as bad as it could have been

Image courtesy of Universal

One of the most popular legal dramas, Suits, came to an end last month. Want to know how popular it is? Take a poll in any law school and you will find an astonishing number of students who were influenced by Suits.

The plot initially revolves around hotshot Manhattan lawyer Harvey Specter (played by Gabriel Macht) and brilliant college dropout Mike Ross (played by Patrick Adams) who has a photographic memory and is hired by Harvey to be his associate. The show’s hook is that Mike is a fraud since he didn’t go to law school, and much of the plot revolves around preventing anyone from finding out about this. They work in a New York City law firm, Pearson Hardman, which is headed by the elegant Jessica Pearson.

Harvey and Mike have what fans like to call a ‘bromance’ Harvey having the swagger and charisma of James Bond and Mike with the uncanny ability to memorise whatever is put in front of him. They get out of intricate legal jams simply by picking up cues from classic movies and their frequent quote-offs add humour to the show.

We are taken on a ride filled with smart, powerful characters and strong dialogues. The writers do a brilliant job of characters’ development throughout the show, along with new relationships being formed between the characters. Flashbacks are used smartly throughout to add a layer of depth to the characters and the story line which incorporates seamlessly with the present timeline of the show. They provide an insight about the characters’ background to the viewers and explain some complex sequences.

Apart from preventing Mike getting caught, the characters are engaged in legal dilemmas and keep us entertained with feisty new characters being introduced.

In season five, Mike’s deception was finally discovered, and he was charged as a result. What followed was a gripping and intense courtroom battle which tested the loyalty of the characters to each other, played out to perfection.

Season six picked up this dangling story line, with episodes touching upon prison life and how real it gets behind bars for Mike. The culmination of the season was Mike getting out and managing, finally, to become a member of the New York Bar Association.The show should have been wrapped up here but ill-advisedly carried on for three more seasons. Unfortunately, here the dialogues got repetitive, the legal dilemmas drifted further apart from reality, and worst of all, the show lost three original members of the cast who were instrumental in the show’s success. The final two seasons introduced new characters which seemed like a poor attempt by the producers to overcompensate for these departures, but ultimately the loss of Mike, Rachel and Jessica was too much to recover from.

All in all, Suits was a wonderful show with powerful characters and strong acting, blanketed by an entertaining story line. Even though the it failed to end on a high, it will hopefully serve as a reminder that it is better to end a show while the fans still want more, rather than when they’re just waiting for it to be over.