Suits LA cancelled: Why NBC pulled the plug on latest spinoff after just one season

NBC tried hard to bring back the essence of Suits, but even a three-hour Suits: LA marathon couldn’t save the show, which kept drowning in low ratings from the very start and only managed to gain some traction in the middle before losing it again. According to Deadline, the viewership barely crossed 1 million on live TV. Even the show didn’t perform well on streaming, which wasn’t Netflix, and that may have played a role in the show’s poor performance. Critics weren’t in favour as well. New York Times critic Margaret Lyons called it “an attempt to turn an unanswerable question into a little money.” Meanwhile, Angie Han from The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Stephen Amell “flounders in NBC’s tonally confused, narratively jumbled legal drama.”

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Many think the decision to not let the show air on Netflix backfired. According to Yahoo News, the makers wanted the spinoff to stick tightly to NBCUniversal’s own streamer, Peacock, which has seen a boost in its subscribers in recent years. The plan was to make Suits: LA a flagship show and draw in more views. As of now, NBC’s plan to extend the OTT rights, which are exclusively kept for Peacock, to Netflix has not been confirmed, but there are rumours that it might happen.

The cancellation also comes at a time when NBC needs to free up space in its content lineup. The network has reportedly signed a $2.5 billion-per-year deal with NBA, which means next season, a lot of airtime will go to basketball. So they’ve axed a bunch of shows to make room—Suits: LA, The Irrational, Found, Night Court, and Lopez vs Lopez all got the chop.