It’s 2023, and everyone seems to be watching Fits. The query is, which Fits are they watching?
In a single nook, we have now Fits, seasons one by means of 4, the absurdist morality play. The idea: a high-powered Manhattan regulation agency and the cutthroat company legal professionals who do their purchasers’ bidding. The title: A reference to the sleazy characters, the glitzy aesthetic, and the truth that, in contrast to most authorized dramas, Fits not often leads to a courtroom.
The catch: Certainly one of these hard-charging legal professionals, bushy-tailed keen beaver Mike Ross, apprentice to the dashing suave dodger Harvey Specter, isn’t really an legal professional in any respect.
Within the different nook, we have now Fits, seasons 5 by means of eight (simply ignore season 9 and the short-lived one-season spinoff, Pearson, neither of which is included on Netflix the place this culture-wide rewatch is going down): wherein the present turns into self-aware, jettisons the ethical antipathy of earlier seasons, and places itself on trial.
Fits by no means acquired its cultural due throughout the 9 seasons it aired on the USA community. Till 2023, its primary declare to fame was boosting the profession of one-time princess Meghan Markle. But it at the moment stands poised to develop into Netflix’s greatest streaming hit of all time, after a viral TikTok video that made the rounds in Could sparked renewed curiosity within the present — which has since been setting streaming records so wild they sound like they’re utterly made up.
The TikTok clip showcases the important thing scene of your complete present: The second Harvey (Gabriel Macht) and Mike (Patrick J. Adams) meet, and Harvey falls in love at first recitation with Mike, his polymath mind, and his photographic reminiscence. Though Mike is a dropout bike messenger who’s actually in the course of working a drug deal after they meet, Harvey hires him on the spot to work for his regulation agency, Pearson. The 2 of them assemble an elaborate deceive create the phantasm that Mike graduated from Harvard Regulation. Harvey’s drive to maintain Mike by his facet in opposition to all odds fuels the plot for a lot of the present’s eight-year run.
Fits will be the sudden hit present of 2023, but it surely premiered in 2011, in a world that felt profoundly completely different from the one it completed with, in 2019. The result’s an odd little time capsule. Over the course of the present, the world modified quickly, and Fits responded to and advanced with that change — a lot in order that we will observe the trajectory of our personal cultural evolution inside its seasons. Fits was born out of an period when nihilistic absurdism dominated TV throughout a broad vary of exhibits, from At all times Sunny to Scandal. The oblivious ethos of that early-season Fits could also be key to its renewed recognition: Philosophically, it’s escapist consolation meals blended with geeky popular culture refs and much an excessive amount of reverence for Aaron Sorkin.
But it’s the latter period of the present that’s actually fascinating. Fits was born out of a society that memed performative uncaring, and it was all too enjoyable and foolish to take significantly — till it wasn’t. Because it progressed, Fits absorbed the ripples of political and cultural unease that characterised the ’10s. Within the present’s highest-rated episode (per IMDb votes), “Religion,” Mike’s childhood priest tells him that he would possibly consider “God” as “penalties.” Fits’ gods are capricious, however after they demand tithes, a bitch higher pay up.
Fits’ first half: A slick authorized buddy drama that turns into an epistemic looking-glass
Patrick J. Adams as Mike Ross and Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter in Fits.
Shane Mahood/USA Community/NBCU Picture Financial institution/NBCUniversal through Getty Pictures
Fits’ first half follows a regulation agency filled with clearly drawn workplace character tropes: no-nonsense boss Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres), final secretary Donna (Sarah Rafferty), unstable wannabe accomplice Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), and long-suffering paralegal turned final girlfriend Rachel (Markle). All of them have one factor in widespread: Their lives revolve across the agency, ultimately generally known as Pearson Specter Litt, or PSL.
That signifies that whether or not they understand it or not, their lives revolve round protecting Mike’s secret. Regardless of the flimsiness of the premise and the whole lack of logic about, effectively, something, the primary half of Fits totally milks the strain between Mike’s go-getter enthusiasm for the regulation and the truth that he’s flagrantly breaking it.
Between this (foolish) high-stakes drama, Fits’ procedural method offers in high-powered pettiness. Every episode sees the agency defending a shady company in opposition to one other shady company, going backwards and forwards over a collection of authorized maneuverings that enable them to commerce quips and drop extremely inconceivable interpretations of the regulation. Our antiheroes normally finagle their method into some sort of ethical excessive floor, however not with out stretching their credibility and our credulity. This Fits is a frothy deal with within the pantheon of self-serious authorized dramas. And because of the more and more outlandish issues Harvey and Mike do to get away with Mike’s crime, like hacking the Harvard database and printing a pretend Harvard diploma, we by no means should take any of it too significantly.
Besides then we do!
Season 4 begins a gradual tonal shift characterised by forewarnings of catastrophe for the agency, in addition to elevated dysfunctionality among the many ensemble. The present’s blatantly antisemitic early-season portrayal of Louis Litt really will get worse for some time as a result of seasons 4 and 5 double down on all of his worst traits within the title of drama. These traits are all heinous stereotypes: Regardless of Rick Hoffman’s finest efforts at humanizing Louis, he’s mean-tempered, buffoonish, weak, disloyal, effeminate, and egocentric above all else. The present presents him as spiteful and vindictive, an affordable, grasping, money-hoarding backstabber who’s obsessive about energy. At one level, he performs the function of Shylock, as if the theme couldn’t get extra specific. Any time the screws are put to him, Louis turns unstable and vengeful. It’s a drained, troubling routine, and sadly, even after the present writers lastly notice what they’ve finished and quickly rehabilitate his character in later seasons, the subtext that he might be the agency’s weak hyperlink — extra of an existential menace even than Mike who’s actually not a lawyer!— by no means totally goes away.
Seasons 5 and 6: The sport modifications
In season 5, which aired in 2015–2016, the tonal change turns into much more pronounced: Harvey, who’s hitherto prided himself on his weaponized superficiality, begins going to remedy to take care of his many abandonment points. And somebody lastly prosecutes Mike for fraud. This improvement forces Fits right into a a lot darker iteration of its implied “ethics schmethics!” worldview. By the point Mike is lastly going through trial within the latter half of season 5, he and Harvey have gone from season one legal professionals (and “legal professionals”) who proudly draw their ethical traces and refuse to cross them to individuals keen to commit blackmail, forgery, perjury, and past. “Do no matter it’s a must to do,” Harvey tells Mike as they get increasingly determined to keep away from jail. “Simply don’t get caught.”
Nevertheless, any time Mike and Harvey use their typical ways — strong-arming, bargaining, one-upmanship — to close down the case, opposing prosecuting legal professional Gibbs (Leslie Hope) surmounts them by counting on the unshakeable reality: Mike isn’t a lawyer. Mike isn’t a lawyer! But one after the other, all the opposite gamers at Pearson Specter line up behind him, committing to performing the lie that he’s. The world of that lie retains increasing; by the point Mike is lastly uncovered, no fewer than 13 recurring forged members know he by no means went to Harvard and are casually strolling round protecting for him.
Fits thus turns into an apt and revealing, if solely unwitting, metaphor for the broader epistemic disaster that’s come to outline a lot of the trendy age, wherein people who find themselves in any other case rational discover themselves shifting in a wholly completely different model of actuality, from local weather change denialism to Covid skepticism to the factual end result of elections. Simply as a lot of Trump’s supporters began out espousing extremist nonsense for laughs but wound up believing their very own rhetoric, Mike and Harvey, who get collectively initially nearly as a troll, in the end come to consider their very own actuality distortion.
Mike turns into so satisfied that he’s an precise lawyer that he tries to tackle a brand new case whereas he’s on trial for pretending to be a lawyer. Each time he careens into the truth that nobody will testify to understanding him at Harvard as a result of nobody knew him as a result of he by no means went to Harvard, he reacts with a dazed headshake, as if he can’t fairly consider they’re inconveniencing him by refusing to assist him bend the reality. It’s troublesome to look at him spend the again half of season 5 frantically attempting and failing to coerce, beg, extort, and bribe witnesses to assist him with out being reminded of Trump asking the Georgia Secretary of State to “discover 11,780 votes.”
For all of the writers clearly need us to root for Harvey and Mike to agree that Mike is, as one shopper’s mom insists, “harmless in [his] coronary heart,” it’s more durable for a post-Trump viewers to do this than it will be for the candy summer time youngsters of the Obama period. Harvey and Mike would possibly deserve mercy after their sins have been acknowledged and confessed. However harmless they aren’t — and Fits, for its first six seasons, isn’t enthusiastic about rehabilitating them. It solely takes them a number of episodes after Harvey lastly engineers an early jail launch for Mike in season six earlier than the 2 of them are again to doing extremely unethical issues to get what they need.
Fits tries to create a world the place the regulation isn’t actuality as a result of it might probably at all times be manipulated for the precise worth. The present needs us to consider that since everybody on this universe is cutthroat and amoral by default, these guys are heroic for at the very least attempting to do the precise factor among the time — besides after they don’t. In different phrases, it’s vibes, not reality, that basically matter.
Which makes its whole abrupt turnaround in season seven such an attention-grabbing reveal — not for what it says about Fits however what it says about the remainder of us.
Season seven of Fits tries to proper its wrongs
All through Fits’ first six seasons, its characters are primarily caricatures whose relationships with themselves and one another are primarily shallow and undeveloped. The present’s feminine characters undergo essentially the most from this underwritten tendency, notably Gina Torres’ Jessica, who by no means actually will get to be greater than a plot gadget. (Torres captained a by-product, Pearson, launched from Fits’ seventh-season finale, but it surely solely lasted a single season, and it’s exhausting to not surprise if that was partly as a result of the writers had so little to construct on.) And although the present lives and dies with the lighthearted chemistry between Mike and Harvey, not even Gabriel Macht’s deep dedication to sending flirtatious smiles in Adams’s route can totally persuade us that Mike deserves to be the place he’s at.
Season seven’s writers appear to have realized all of this abruptly. (It’s most likely no coincidence it was the primary full season to observe the 2016 election.) As soon as it has straightened out the large plot wrinkle it began with, the present goes full-throttle redemption arc, working time beyond regulation to deepen its characters and restore all of its negatives directly. Newly born once more and (someway) (nonsensically) admitted to the bar for real-real, Mike begins tackling large-scale professional bono instances with a social justice edge. Louis, we be taught, has really been in remedy all alongside; the present fast-tracks him by means of a private development arc that sees him nearly immediately studying to place different individuals earlier than himself. Donna, whose complete character til now has been “being loyal to Harvey,” instantly will get desires and features like, “I believe I remorse placing Harvey over myself.” Season seven can’t cease telling you the way feminist it’s: “A person can’t swing a useless cat round right here with out hitting a strong-willed lady,” Rachel’s father says at one level.
When, within the seventh-season finale, Mike lastly tells Harvey, “That is who I’m, it’s who I’ve at all times been” — that means that he’s an moral do-good lawyer who solely needs to take pro-bono work for the betterment of humanity — Harvey is simply too good to remind him what an enormous retcon that is, for each him and for Fits.
It helps that the present doesn’t should hold Mike on the straight and slim for lengthy: As a substitute, it provides Mike and Rachel a season seven finale send-off, offering them each with an opportunity to sail into the sundown as pro-bono legal professionals. (Rachel’s fictional marriage ceremony aired in April 2018, simply three weeks earlier than Markle’s precise fairy story marriage ceremony.) That send-off additionally doubles as one other reset: As season eight rolls round, the remaining crew is true again to company schemes and stratagems, now headed up by Rachel’s dad (Wendell Pierce), who manages to be each enjoyable and terrifying as the brand new high brass. Nonetheless, Fits, now self-aware, can by no means utterly retreat into its former malaise of substituting film quotes and popular culture cred for human connection and empathy.
By the present’s finish, it’s all grown up; and if all of us appreciated it a bit of higher when it was youthful, obnoxious, and oblivious — effectively, maybe all of us appreciated ourselves a bit of higher in 2011, too.
