Stephen Amell Addresses ‘Failure’ of ‘Suits LA’: ‘It Didn’t Work’

Stephen Amell is getting candid about the cancellation of NBC‘s former Suits spinoff, Suits LA, which got the axe before its Season 1 finale aired in May 2025.

As viewers who tuned into the show may recall, Amell played Los Angeles attorney Ted Black, a friend to Gabriel Macht‘s Harvey Specter, who was a main character on the original series that aired on USA Network. In a new interview on the podcast Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum, Amell got candid about the show’s poor performance, even going so far as to blame himself.

Amell stated that the series just “wasn’t good enough” to last, as he noted, “Anything that ends not on your terms is a failure.” The actor, who has previously starred on Arrow and Heels and is set to headline Fox‘s upcoming Baywatch reboot, said, “Ultimately, I think that 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,” Amell elaborated. “Because you do something that is magnetic, that is charismatic, that fixes those problems. And I didn’t do that.”

The actor went on to add, “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.”

Ultimately, sentiment was echoed by Jeff Bader, NBC’s president of programming strategy, who said at the time of the show’s cancellation, “Suits [LA] had a very short run, but 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.”

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According to Amell, a difference of vision between the network and the show’s creator Aaron Korsh caused some problems. “A lot of what he wanted to do seemed to run up against what the network wanted,” Amell continued. “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.”

Despite Amell taking the blame, he said, “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,'” Amell added, then explained, “If it’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.”

What did you think of Suits LA? Did you want to see a second season? Let us know in the comments section below.

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