The most-watched show of the summer isn't the second season of critically applauded Disney+ drama The Bear. Nor is it the hotly anticipated (yet coolly received) comeback of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, returning with its first full season run since 2019.
Instead, the show on everyone's screens (and lips) is Suits – the legal dramedy which made its initial debut 12 years ago.
Suits has had a rapid and unexpected resurgence in popularity over the last few weeks, where it has dominated streaming services. Having sat at the top of the Nielsen charts for the past month, the show has racked up an eye-watering 12.8 billion minutes viewed over that period, securing the title of the most popular acquired show of all time.
Fans flocking to rewatch old shows isn't anything particularly new; classic series such as The Office and Friends have previously surpassed the billion-minute mark shortly after becoming available on streaming platforms. However, none have managed such a sudden and steep influx of newfound popularity as Suits.
So why has Suits become the show of the summer, more than a decade since it first aired? A particularly unusual and intriguing set of circumstances have fostered the environment which has allowed Suits' popularity to flourish.
The show has a simple concept behind it, taking a tried-and-tested successful formula (the courtroom drama) and placing a fresh new spin on it. Mike Ross (played by Patrick J Adams) plays a college dropout who uses his superior intellect and photographic memory to fake his way to the top of a New York law firm.
Working alongside Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), the pair show a ruthless and insatiable hunger to win the cases they're assigned through barely legal loopholes – all while concealing Mike's secret. It's a gripping series, with the easy chemistry between Adams and Macht, alongside the slick scriptwriting, making it popular among critics and audiences alike.
While Suits has always been huge in the States – it was the second most-watched show on cable television, behind Game of Thrones – the show had more modest success in the UK.
The first six series aired on Dave before it was dropped in 2017, leaving Netflix to swoop in and hoover up the remaining episodes.
It was almost an inevitability that Suits was going to be a streaming success story. It comes from an era of television before networks were so heavily invested in big-budget prestige dramas. While shows such as Succession, The White Lotus and Big Little Lies have dominated at award ceremonies, attracted A-List casts and garnered countless column inches of critical acclaim, they tend to be shorter, tighter and intended for deeper analysis.
Big Little Lies, for instance, boasts only 14 episodes in its two-series run, with a neat, finely tuned storyline that demands the full attention of its viewer. Succession, meanwhile, is intricately layered, with each scene ripe for theories and debate.
Shows such as Suits serve as the antithesis of this – not for their quality, but how they intend to be viewed. While there are overarching storylines and subplots in Suits, its 'new episode, new case' format makes it addictively easy. Paired with the fact there are 134 episodes of the drama for viewers to sink their teeth into, Suits is an easily digestible binge-watch – it's the perfect show for passive viewing.
"Sometimes, you don't want to have to use your brain to watch TV," viewer Peter, who has started rewatching Suits this year, explains. "Suits is great to have on in the background.
"I got hooked all over again easily. It's very watchable and the characters are well cast."
The cast itself, aside from its easy chemistry, has contributed to Suits' second round of success: ie, the Meghan Markle factor.
It would be naïve to pretend that the presence of the now-Duchess of Sussex hasn't fed its burst of popularity. Playing Rachel Zane, the sharp paralegal with dreams of attending law school herself, Markle took her first leading role – indeed her biggest role to date – in Suits when the show was released in 2011. She had only boasted a few roles in cheesy Hallmark movies before Suits made her a household name in the States.
But as Rachel Zane climbed her way to the top of one firm, Markle joined another – her relationship and marriage to Prince Harry in 2018 made Meghan Markle quite literally celebrity royalty.
With the Duchess of Sussex an established honeypot draw to swarms of viewers – the docu-series Harry & Meghan was Netflix's most-watched show last year – it's no surprise that fans of Meghan (or those who love to loathe her) are keen to tune into Suits to see her acting chops.
This summer is also an unusually quiet one for new releases. While we've seen a few success stories with Heartstopper and The Bear, the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes have seen networks and streaming services space out new shows, leaving bigger gaps in the schedules that old favourites such as Suits and Yellowstone are now filling.
Algorithms fuel this further before growth becomes organic; Netflix pushes Suits on subscribers, who tell their friends they're watching Suits, and so on and so forth.
But perhaps it's the ongoing wider cultural landscape that has been the main driving force behind the huge success of Suits. The summer of 2023 has seen ongoing economic uncertainty, increasingly divisive politics and terrible weather.
It's little wonder, then, that during these more turbulent times, there's a greater appetite for nostalgia and comforting, feel-good content: Barbie grossed over $1 billion and enjoyed record-breaking office success, while classic sitcom Alf is one of the latest programmes touted for a reboot.
It's why we still see regularly see the likes of Grey's Anatomy and The Big Bang Theory appear in Nielsen charts; effectively, be it a prestige drama or trough television, TV is the great comforter.
Suits is just the latest soothing balm being applied to counter a frenzied, fevered world.
Suits is available to stream on Netflix.
