It is August 2023, and humanity still just wants to keep on watching Suits

The human race’s apparently unshakeable dependence on the long-canceled USA legal drama Suits reached a new milestone this week, as THR reports that our species, as a whole, spent 7,382 years a few weeks ago watching the Gabriel Macht-starring series. That’s 3.88 billion minutes spread across the 7.8 billion people on the planet, which means that every single living human being—babies, people living on the far side of the planet, those of us who just preferred White Collar— could have watched 30 seconds of Suits during the week of July 17 through July 23 of the year of our lord 2023, and still just barely have cleared the actual number.

This is, unsurprisingly, a record, setting the highest total viewing for an acquired show in streaming history, a record previously held by… hold on, let us check these numbers… had ’em right here, where’d the dang things get to… Oh, okay, here we go: A record previously held by the long-canceled USA legal drama Suits, which set it the week before, before smashing it to pieces once again. (And even if you knock off that “acquired” caveat, we’re still looking at the 13th-most successful week a streaming project has had, period, since Nielsen first started getting semi-credible numbers for streaming.)

As we’ve noted before, there are plenty of reasons for people to flock to Suits, even when you subtract out the Meghan Markle of it all: The show itself is well-written, charmingly acted, fast-paced, and just heavy enough to feel like you’re actually watching something, without leaving a lot of unpleasant “feelings” or “ideas” in its wake. Even so, its reception since moving on to streaming feels anomalous: We are, after all, talking about a show that was pulling in 4 million viewers a week at the best of times, and was regularly posting sub-million ratings by the time its final season rolled around. Certainly, it has been far more culturally dominant on Netflix and Peacock than it ever was on USA, in ways that speak to something fundamental in the spirit of streaming viewers—some deep desire for comfort, or ease, or maybe just Gina Torres being calmly badass at people while Patrick J. Adams wears a fancy suit.