Stephen Amell, who led NBC’s Suits L.A., said he’s taking responsibility for the show’s cancellation after one season.
The actor, who played Los Angeles attorney Ted Black in the Suits spinoff, made a recent appearance on the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast, where he admitted that he thought the show “wasn’t good enough.” He added, “Anything that ends not on your terms is a failure.”
However, Amell also put the show’s lack of success on himself personally, saying, “The blame rests with me.”
“Whatever problem you have with the show — because I think that there were issues — it’s my job to solve those, to smooth them over and to gloss them up with some type of performance or something that, tangible or otherwise, covers up those mistakes,” he explained. “Because you do something that is magnetic, that is charismatic, that fixes those problems. And I didn’t do that.”
He added, “I didn’t find anything ultimately with Ted Black, that character, that translated, that smoothed those things over, that gave us a chance to keep going.”
Later, the Arrow alum expanded on his reasoning, saying if the show’s “successful, I’m gonna get a disproportionate amount of the credit, and so I think it’s only fair that I stand in front and I take the blame. I’m the lead of the series and it didn’t work.”
Amell claimed he wasn’t the only one who questioned the spinoff’s potential, even before it premiered. He said Aaron Korsh — who created Suits L.A. and Suits, which ran from 2011 to 2019 — also had some doubts.
“When I saw the pilot of Suits L.A. — and this goes back to about a month after we finished shooting — I sat down with Aaron Korsh, who created Suits and Suits L.A., and he was editing the pilot. He was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work,’” he recalled. “A lot of what he wanted to do seemed to run up against what the network wanted. It seems like they just … I don’t want to say they battled, because I wasn’t a part of those conversations, so I’m not going to speculate. But it just seemed like what he wanted to do and what they wanted to do were different.”
Amell concluded that it was “tough” having Suits L.A. not renewed for a second season, but that ultimately, “It’s also not anyone’s fault.”
“We certainly thought that we were gonna have another [season] and we’d get to work out some of those issues, and it just so happened that they went, ‘Nope, we’re gonna pull the plug,’” the Heels actor said.
Suits L.A. also starred Lex Scott Davis, Josh McDermitt, Bryan Greenberg, Rachelle Goulding, Maggie Grace and Troy Winbush.
NBC’s president of programming strategy, Jeff Bader, previously said during a conference call with media that the spinoff “had a very short run” because “it really just has not resonated the way we thought it would. There can be many, many reasons — people are speculating why it hasn’t resonated, but it’s just not really showing the potential to grow for us in the future, unfortunately.”
