Suits LA

Based on the episodes provided for review, Suits LA is off to a promising start. It has the right number of references to the original series, compelling characters that slightly resemble their predecessors without being carbon copies, and a new setting that raises the bar in terms of the cases that will be presented each week.

As a standalone show, it did improve over the course of the first few episodes, though it’s also spending too much time flashing back to 2010 to revisit a case that we can predict will propel Ted from federal prosecutor to entertainment lawyer. He also lacks a foil like Adams’s Mike (so far), which ends up burdening him with too much of the emotional narrative. Still, if what you like is smart, well-dressed lawyers constantly one-upping each other, you’ll find that here.

As the show goes on, it becomes a little more interesting — not the main story, so much, which involves Ted’s defense of a producer accused of murder, on which he is staking his professional reputation. It takes up a lot of air without being in the least compelling. But around the edges, in the lesser plots and comic moments. .... embers are glowing.

This is bad TV as addictive as semi-warm pizza or a post-pub kebab. Objectively, it is awful. But goodness, it goes down easily, and there is the bonus of it never taking itself seriously.

This gives the show slightly more depth than many broadcast series today, but it’s nowhere near the entertaining, complex psychological machinations on display in “The White Lotus,” which airs on HBO at the same time.

If this show can shuck off its tiresome flashbacks as well as its more ridiculous twists (viewers who reach the end of the pilot will have no question as to what at least one of them might be), there could be something watchable here. But Suits fans hoping for a West Coast-flavored edition may struggle to find here what they enjoyed before.

A show that’s both too much and not enough at the same time.

Because Suits LA kicks off in absolute mayhem, it barely gets the chance to be fun. Even the banter that Korsh did so well in Suits is almost non-existent. It is heavy and dark from the get-go, with several plot twists, backstabbing, and even underdeveloped angst just in its first hour.

“Suits LA” is flat and joyless.

Maybe this series will break free of Ted’s gloom eventually, and find its way toward the clear blue skies that its title suggests it should have been chasing all along. But by then, I can’t imagine I’ll still be watching.

Aside from Erica, and an occasional good Ted Black moment (Amell has the cadence and the jawline), the banter wilts more than it zings. Without it, Suits LA is just convoluted plot and unrealistically alert lawyers – maybe baseline entertaining, but not sexy. Without it – after three episodes, at least – this spinoff is just business.

Suits LA can't reconcile the new, lowered expectations of the TV medium with the show it wants to be, and that sabotages any genuine attempts to keep the franchise alive.

A bargain-basement version of its parent show.

Yes, the dialogue is stilted and almost exclusively exposition. Sure, the supporting cast is as bland as a Dodger Dog and the stages as prosaic as Dodger Stadium. But a solid central character can get you to look past all that, and Ted is too one-note, too unpleasant, and too damn angry to encourage our investment.

It’s pieces being moved around a board at random, in ways that aren’t satisfying because we have no idea why anyone is doing what they’re doing, and where most of the dialogue is pure posturing.

After a lumpy and confounding pilot filled with grating dialogue, jarring camera angles and a bizarre twist, the show attempts to stabilize in Episode 2, “Old Man Hanrahan.” Still, because it relies so heavily on the New York storyline and a barrage of gimmicky cameos from the late John Amos, Patton Oswalt and others, audiences can never truly settle in and take this new “Suits” world seriously.