NBC orders pilot for that Suits spin-off you all binged into existence

If we had to give an official nickname to the Year Of Our Lord 2023—distilling down the various events, themes, crises, and obsessions of an entire 12-month span into a single catch-all categorization—it’d probably have to be The Year Where Y’all Watched A Goddamned Massive Amount Of Suits.

You don’t have to take our word for it: The Nielsen data is all still out there, with month upon month of the ostensibly hottest streaming shows on the planet—Star Wars shows! Marvel stuff! One Piece!—all trailing along behind a long-canceled legal drama from the depths of basic cable. This ended up having the same tidal effect that moving money always has on this industry, as series creator Aaron Korsh pretty rapidly went from “I don’t have any more stories to tell in the Suits universe” to “Actually, let me look around in the back and check.”

Which leads us to today, as Deadline reports that NBC has just issued a pilot order for Suits: L.A., a new series set in the same universe as the original show. (Technically not a spin-off, we guess, since the series won’t star any of the original cast, or even feature them in the pilot episode—although we’d be shocked if this thing goes to series and then doesn’t start featuring Gabriel Macht drive-bys within months.) The pilot is being directed by Victoria Mahoney, whose previous credits include serving as a second-unit director on The Rise Of Skywalker, plus a whole bunch of episode stints on recent shows like Lovecraft Country, The Morning Show, and Night Sky.

Now, you may be asking yourself: Given the meteoric success of Suits reruns last year, why only the pilot order, instead of a full-season buy? If we had to wager, we’d note that the Suits bump has at least partially burnt off at this point; we’ll also point out that streamers didn’t seem to respond in similar force to the Peacock release of the show’s first spin-off, the single-season Gina Torres vehicle Pearson. There’s also the whole “nobody from the original show” thing: No one’s going to deny that Korsh’s talent for drafting witty, super-smart, personally messy characters was a huge draw for the original series; but nobody’s going to try saying a whole lot of people weren’t there to spend several hours looking at Macht or Patrick J. Adams in their titular fancy duds, either. It’ll be an interesting experiment to see if this new series can draft off the late-life success of the old.