When Gina Torres’ Jessica Pearson left Suits last year, many viewers felt she was done with the show for good. However, Torres has returned to the show, now in its seventh season, on a number of occasions to offer advice to Harvey Specter, as he has taken over as the firm’s managing partner. Most likely, the network wants to keep Torres visible on the series as it works toward a planned spin-off series featuring Pearson.
Details on that series are now emerging, via TVLine, and the most surprising detail is that the spin-off will not be a legal drama. The Chicago set spin-off will see Jessica Pearson transition into a life of Chicago politics, territory most recently mined by the CBS legal and political drama The Good Wife, a show from which Suits has taken many of its cues.
The spin-off is expected to premiere as a backdoor pilot in the seventh season finale of Suits, which will see the old gang — Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams), Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty) and Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle) — reunite in Chicago to aid Pearson as she enters the world of dirty Chicago politics (and if The Good Wife is any indication, it’s also a small, incestuous world).
Creator Aaron Korsh — who used to work on Wall Street — has no experience writing about the political world, but he had no experience writing about the law, either, and Suits is the highest rated show on the network. Korsh does, however, write swagger and bluster well, and that talent should benefit him on the political spin-off. Since its second season, Suits has been less about the law and more about intraoffice politics, anyway, so the transition into electoral politics shouldn’t be too difficult for Korsh.
The backdoor pilot is expected to air in early 2018.
via TVLine
