The second-highest rated cable show in July—behind only Game of Thrones—was USA Network's slick, swaggering legal drama Suits. This was no fluke. Since its debut in 2011, Suits has emerged as the network's biggest hit, reaching its 100th episode last month in a milestone rarely seen on cable television. It’s even getting a spinoff. But over dinner on the patio of Wolfdown in Los Feliz, Patrick J. Adams, one of the show's two leading men, is considering why, exactly, Suits is nearly invisible in the pop culture landscape.

Suits is in many ways the definition of a Zeitgeist show. Inspired by showrunner Aaron Korsh’s time on Wall Street, its central obsessions (the accumulation of wealth, status and power, and what that pursuit does to interpersonal loyalty) amounts to a fever dream of 21st century capitalism, a true reflection of America in 2017. The global fan base is enamored with this story of New York City’s best closer, Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) and his brilliant but troubled protégé Mike Ross (Adams), whom Harvey hires despite knowing he doesn’t have a law degree. Years of impeccably styled, snappily delivered, emotionally charged storytelling has flowed from that single—and insane—decision. And yet you don’t see obsessive recaps or think pieces about the show’s cultural impact—journalists, with rare exception, do not write about Suits.

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“It doesn't feel like it's one of those shows that changes television,” Adams says, “but it's one of those shows that people love to have in between the shows that change television. There’s the show that’s going to change the way I think about art, and life, and myself, and my family, and then there’s the show I just want to watch because I love these people, and they make me feel good.”

The show's success surprised even the cast, according to Adams. Sure, they thought it was good, but nobody knew what to make of the passionate response. People talk to him about Suits as if it's a surprise. They thought they were going to hate it. Then they watched it, and couldn't stop watching it.

"It was almost a guilty pleasure thing," he says.



“Gabriel and I have really struggled with the tenor of the show. It's different now, it has to be."

Suits started life as a bright-eyed, escapist slice of blockbuster entertainment, and has retained that core identity over the years, even as the TV and political landscapes have shifted under its feet. Although its characters do genuinely change, the series doesn’t have the psychological weight of a “prestige” character drama like Mad Men, nor the strict episodic structure of a procedural like Law & Order. Instead, it walks a line somewhere between the two.

Part of the Suits magic is the show’s lack of traditional action—or, as Adams says, “no tragedy, no violence, it’s ultimately kind of the same thing we’ve been doing for seven years.” There are shifting loyalties, blackmail, betrayals, mergers, characters leaving and rejoining the firm, seemingly disastrous professional blows, but very little permanent change. At times while shooting, Adams admits, he has felt an uneasy sense of déjà vu: “We’ve done this before! This can’t possibly work! And we do it, and people go ‘Yes! We love it! That’s Suits!’”



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The sixth season, for example, begins with Mike behind bars. After years of evading justice, he’s finally arrested for fraud. “We built an entire huge prison set for that season,” Adams says. “It was one of the most impressive sets I've ever seen. And I want to say 70 percent of what we shot there was in my tiny little cell, and in the interrogation room. Because Suits is about people in small spaces having high-stakes conversations.”

That’s Suits. It’s a show that will build an entire set and use only two rooms of it—not for lack of ambition, but because its writers understand the narrative boundaries. And in an era where TV’s limitations have never felt more fluid, where the line between TV and film has never felt thinner, that can feel like a double-edged sword for an actor.

Mike can go to jail, but only if he’s there for less than half a season, gets out with no long-term emotional repercussions, and is back to practicing law within a year. In contrast, Adams says, “my favorite shows are shows where when something happens, it has a profound impact, where one thing happens and you can see the ripple effect through seasons, and in my mind, initially, we were doing that.”

“I don’t think people can die on Suits. It’s still, at its heart, an aspirational show."

Midway through season two, the sudden death of Mike’s grandmother (his only living family, who raised him after the death of his parents) was a lesson in the show’s deliberate limitations. “I was like, ‘Here we go, this is gonna change everything,' and I came in ready to have it be this eviscerating, painful, emotional, complex thing that we’d play out over the whole season. But of course, they were like: ‘We can’t have that. You can be upset, but you need to kind of process it and move on because we have other things we need to do.’”

The show is not without depths, he continues, but “you touch on the depths and then yank it back. That’s its rhythm. People like to feel that they get near the pain and suffering, and then they like to feel safe that it’s all good, we can joke about it right away.”



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That desire for a deeper, more character-driven journey might be attributed, in part, to Adams’ background in theater and the out-of-the-blue SAG nomination he received for season one of Suits. “That was the craziest year of my life. It was so out of nowhere, I didn’t even understand what was happening, or what those processes were.” He was so overcome with nerves at the actual ceremony that he barely remembers it, he says, but “to have that kind of recognition for this character was unbelievable.”



Although Mike Ross was born in the heyday of the TV anti-hero, he was never going to be a contender alongside Don Draper and Walter White. Yes, Suits is essentially about a conman and his enabler, and much of its drama boils down to Mike and Harvey working unscrupulously to cover up their own lies, dragging down others in the process, including Harvey’s secretary Donna (Sarah Rafferty) and Mike’s colleague and love interest Rachel (Meghan Markle). But there’s never any real doubt that these are fundamentally good guys. There is nothing genuinely objectionable or challenging in Suits, nothing that will make you feel compromised by rooting for its characters, and there’s a reason for that. Until recently, USA had a strict credo for its programming, which essentially boiled down to a two-point checklist: Its shows need an offbeat lead with a moral center, and they need “blue skies,” meaning they’re hopeful, aspirational and out of step with the darker tone of most cable fare.



Suits is the last vestige of the blue skies time at USA, having outlasted its contemporaries White Collar, Royal Pains, Covert Affairs and Burn Notice. It now coexists with the likes of Mr. Robot, which came along two years ago to permanently change the face of USA and put the network into Emmy contention for the first time. Like Suits, Mr. Robot centers on an alienated orphan genius trying to keep his mask from slipping off in the world of corporate New York, but the shows might as well be set on different planets for all the tonal common ground they share.

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It’s impossible to know what Suits might look like if it debuted on the 2017 version of USA, and Adams is now sanguine about the show’s reality. “Suits is Suits,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s grown and changed and evolved in lots of ways that I'm super proud of, but as an actor on a show like this, you try and make it something other than what it is sometimes. It’s Aaron's job—and he does it very well—to go ‘I understand you're hungry for more of this, and we can play with more of that, but this is the show.’ We gotta keep it on the path.”



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But even Korsh is not immune to the impulse to turn things dark; during press last year, he revealed that when actress Gina Torres decided to leave the show, his original plan was for Jessica—the head of the law firm where the main characters work as well as Harvey’s mentor—to be killed by an unhinged defendant. The network said no, and in this instance, Adams is grateful. “I don't think people can die on Suits. It’s still, at its heart, an aspirational show, and it would be so hard to watch these people wrestle with that.”

That consistency has paid off. The intense Suits fandom shows no signs of fading, and Adams is clearly both grateful and bewildered by the level of devotion. (“Gabriel and I have delved a little bit,” he notes with a smile, in reference to the online reams of homoerotic fan fiction between Mike and Harvey). But he’s more reticent now than he was; previously active on Twitter and Instagram, Adams abruptly deactivated all of his social media profiles last month. “I'm not good at it, I overthink every post that I put out and the ramifications and who'll be listening and how it'll be received.”

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And then, last month, the final straw. “I posted this old photo I had found of Meghan and I on set,” he recalls, a photograph from years ago of Markle kissing his cheek. It was a nostalgic moment, prompted in part by the 100th episode, and he thought nothing more of it. “I went to bed, and woke up in the morning and realized ‘Oh, yeah. I live in a world where you can’t post things about Meghan.’”



The photograph was explosive now that Markle is not just Adams’ co-star of six years, but one of the most famous women in the world by virtue of her relationship with Prince Harry. “I had this onslaught of people retweeting the thing, people thinking it was a recent picture, and I just thought, ‘What the hell is going on?’ It was such an innocent moment of sentimentality that was twisted into something totally different. It made me feel like… why put myself through this? We’re like brother and sister, it’s not like it was lurid or anything, but it just became a story that people wanted to talk about.” He doesn’t rule out going back at some point, but for now he’s finding the social media blackout to be a relief.

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With an eighth season of Suits yet to be confirmed (“They’re still figuring all of that out,” he says) Adams is focusing on more directing work, including a short film named We Are Here, which he co-wrote and stars in with Troian Bellisario, his wife of almost a year. “It’s exciting to have a romantic relationship with somebody you're also so inspired by professionally,” he says. “Every day, I take a look at the way she approaches her work and it makes me re-focus and go, 'Oh, wow, don't get lazy, don't get bitter, don’t get cynical,' because she's none of those things. She's the real deal.”



Adams and Bellisario met while co-starring in a play in 2009, during which she was offered the pilot for her soon-to-be-huge series Pretty Little Liars, and watching how she conducted herself through that process proved instructive for Adams. “I had shot a pilot and been fired from it, and that was really my worst nightmare, that I’d bottomed out. Why are you doing this? You’re worthless. This city is horrible. You don’t have enough abdominal muscles to make it… I kind of freaked out, and [Troian] was right there with me saying, ‘No, that thing was dumb, it wasn’t what you were supposed to do.’” She was right, and a few months later Adams had Suits.

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Adams and Bellisario are both politically outspoken, and have received variations on the now-familiar “stick to acting” response from trolls online. By the time the check comes, my conversation with Adams has reached the subject to which all conversations in 2017 invariably lead, and so I ask about the role of Suits in Trump’s America. This is one of a handful of shows that has been around long enough to feel appreciably different in our new political reality, especially as a show about the corridors of power in New York. If Suits was set in the real world, Harvey Specter would move in the same social circles as the Trumps pre-White House. He’d be acquainted with The Mooch, if only as a person to avoid at fundraisers. And while he wouldn’t vote for Trump, he might find some common ground with Trump the businessman.

Does the show’s celebration of winning at all costs, even if those costs include fraud, blackmail and misrepresentation of your own qualifications, feel different now?

“Gabriel and I have really struggled with the tenor of the show,” Adams admits. “It's different now, it has to be because it's a show that's really glamorized power, manipulation, aggression, self-aggrandizement, greed to some extent. All these qualities that almost overnight went from being sort of playfully funny, to…”

He trails off.

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“There have been moments when Gabriel and I are in a room shooting a scene and we’re like, we gotta be careful not to feel tone-deaf. Do we really want to be celebrating this kind of cocky machismo thing? Because it doesn't seem heroic any more, it seems dangerous.”



There has been a noticeable shift in the new season towards less hollow ambition: having served his time and finally passed the bar, Mike wants to work on more pro-bono cases. Adams says of his character: “I do think we have a responsibility to be aware of the stories we're telling, and how those stories will be interpreted, and what sorts of value systems we're celebrating.”

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But in the end, Suits is Suits. This is, again, a show that knows its own narrative limitations down to the letter, and has insulated itself over the years by remaining resolutely apolitical. As Adams notes: “We’ve been in New York for seven years and we’ve never talked about 9/11 once. It doesn’t dwell on those things, the show doesn’t operate in that world, and we’re not denigrating one way of thinking over another.”



And so Suits remains reliable comfort viewing of the highest order, a world that dabbles in moral decline without anything truly vicious happening, a world in which even the anti-heroes are good people, and a world in which nothing is ever irreparable.