Empty Suits

I don't watch a lot of TV series regularly, checking in every week, but one that I did was Suits on the USA Network.  It wasn't exactly a guilty pleasure, since I didn't feel especially guilty about it.  The dialogue was smart, the characters well drawn, and the acting was quite good almost across the board.  Many series hire beautiful actresses for window dressing, but on Suits the casting director and producers should get an Emmy simply for doing something rare for TV -- finding beautiful actresses who are all terrific actresses. 

The failings I found with the show is that they got a bit too distracted for my taste with the soap opera sub-plots and ignored the legal cases, which were generally quite interesting, but often handled in a too-cursory manner.  Also, I wished that they'd accept their own premise -- that a brilliant young man didn't go to law school, but read through all the law books and was good enough to pass bar exams he took for others.  And he gets hired knowingly by a hot shot lawyer to a prestigious firm as a supposed Harvard grad.  If they accepted their premise, unbelievable as it is, and then just moved on, it was fun to watch.  But in periodically putting the guy in jeopardy of being found out...that was always problematic for me, because if they were going to get that believable, then things could only fall apart and get bizarrely convoluted...because the premise is utterly unbelievable.  So, just accept your unbelievable premise and move on.

But okay, I could accept that, sort of.  Up to a point.

And the point got passed in the first episode of the second season.  I was looking forward to it, but not only did the soap opera sub-plot aspect (will they-won't they-will they-won't they) get ratcheted up (yet again) and not only was he put in jeopardy at being found out (yet again) in the most obvious way -- a prospective hire at the firm who went to Harvard at the same time didn't recognize him (gee, go figure), but the case at hand dealt around the issue of honesty, and the young associate got so unrelentingly over-the-top about how deceitful the firm was being in winning a case that he went and risked an act that would have put any lawyer at risk...and then continued to berate the others at the firm for their dishonesty and duplicity, to the extent that it looked like it could be a continuing theme.  And I thought to myself, "Say what??  This is a guy who is lying about not having gone to law school and lying about not having passed the bar, and every case he is involved with would be thrown out of court if he was ever discovered and his firm would be destroyed and people might even be jailed -- and he's yammering on and on and on about honesty??!!"

And I took the series off my my DVR's series list.

I'll keep an eye on it, and if an individual episode looks look, I'll check in on it.  Because the show has smart dialogue, interesting characterizations, and good acting.  But it just got far too convoluted for its own good.