USA Network’s ‘Suits’ Gets Its Bro-Mojo Back With Its Seventh Season Premiere

The sixth season of USA Network’s Suits was not good. At the end of the fifth season, the series took a huge gamble by exposing Mike Ross as a fraud, putting him on trial and convicting him, forcing showrunner Aaron Korsh into a no-win situation: either find a cheap loophole to allow Mike escape prison, or spend a few episodes (or more) with a prison storyline, and prison storylines never work. The ploy was all the more ridiculous because it robbed the show of its original premise — lawyer without a law degree practices law — and more egregiously, the show did eventually find a clumsy way to get Mike out of prison, only to put him back to work as a lawyer.

Reminder: Mike Ross still doesn’t have a law degree, but he does have a felony conviction for impersonating a lawyer. I still don’t quite understand how he got his license back without ever fulfilling the major requirement one needs to become a lawyer, namely going to law school. Bygones. If Ed Sheeran can be a Lannister soldier on Game of Thrones, we can probably let this go.

The important thing is that the seventh season of Suits is back on track, rediscovering what it was we once loved about this show, namely bro-mantic banter between Mike and Harvey and the overly obvious movie references. After spending most of last season keeping these two characters apart and/or at odds with each other, Mike returned to work at Pearson Specter Litt (again, without a law degree). Moreover, the Game of Thrones inter-office politics that have dominated the series in the last few years seems to have settled: Harvey has ascended to managing partner; Donna has taken a page out of the playbook of Joan Harris on Mad Men and risen from secretary to partner at the firm, and Louis has temporarily relinquished control of the associates to Rachel Zane while he deals with his nervous breakdown. Poor Louis.

Crucially, Mike and Harvey are working together again, instead of working against each other or working to save each other’s asses. In the seventh season premiere, Mike and Harvey traded good-natured barbs, reconfirmed their love for one another, and scuttled a fraudulent deal one of their clients was attempting to push through to sell a vodka company. There was lots of braggadocio; some chest puffing; a power move or two, and some models. Typical Suits. Meanwhile, Harvey is trying to sleep with his therapist (ethics are not this show’s strong suit, clearly); Mike and Rachel are enjoying each other’s company again; Louis is yelling at the associates, and Donna has firm control over everything. It’s just as it should be on Suits, and if Korsh were a smart man, he’d spend a season dealing mostly with the cases of the week that dominated earlier seasons of the show and leave the office politics to The Good Fight.

Meanwhile, if the return of the bro mojo and the deserved rise of the female characters isn’t enough to compel viewers to return to Suits this season, the addition to the cast as a series regular of Dulé Hill should provide plenty of enticement. Hill is expected to debut in tonight’s second episode.

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