The most streamed TV show of 2023 wasn’t a cult classic or a critical darling. It was Suits, the glossy legal drama that has develop into a runaway hit on Netflix. The USA Network drama aired its last episode in the fall of 2019, bringing an unofficial end to the network’s era of breezy “blue-sky” dramas like Monk and Psych. But it became a surprise smash in 2023, topping Nielsen’s streaming charts for a record 12 weeks in a row and ending the yr with a cumulative 57.7 billion minutes—edging out the mark set by The Office in 2020, the first yr Nielsen began releasing Top 10 charts.
The past several years have seen surges in viewership for shows like The Office, Friends, and Girls, as viewers found their way back to old favorites and recent generations made the classics their very own. But there hasn’t been a phenomenon quite like the one around Suits, elevating a midlist show all the technique to the top of the heap. Even at their peak, the blue-sky shows were ubiquitous filler—Saturday Night Live built an entire game-show sketch around contestants’ inability to recollect anything about the USA hit Burn Notice except the incontrovertible fact that it was on the air. (Guesses on its subject include “a sexy doctor who can start fires with his mind” and “a show about handsome firemen?”) But in a yr when the promise of Peak TV gave the impression to be coming to an end, ubiquitous filler gave the impression to be the order of the day.
Yet, as Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall put it: “Why Suits? Why now?” There are easy explanations, like the show’s debut on Netflix and the incontrovertible fact that a network show with 134 episodes has a built-in advantage over short-run streaming originals in relation to racking up overall minutes. Procedurals—workplace dramas that construct most episodes around an issue of the week—are overwhelmingly the most popular series on broadcast TV: 2023’s Top 10 includes NCIS, FBI, Blue Bloods, Chicago Fire, and Fire Country. So it’s not surprising that streaming would follow the same pattern—or that featuring the future Duchess of Sussex amongst its forged might give Suits a wee boost in the awareness department. But while the audience that keeps those shows on the air (and, for the most part, on CBS) is famously graying, Suits has, as even a cursory flick through TikTok demonstrates, found a surprisingly robust fan base amongst Generation Z.
Zoomers’ embrace of Suits seems counterintuitive at first. Why would those of a generation with more content tailor-made for it than ever before—one with entire divisions of publishing and entertainment-making dedicated to serving its needs—turn to a thoroughly mid series from the previous decade once they may very well be watching Heartstopper or The Summer I Turned Pretty? Aren’t children imagined to be, if not smarter or higher than their parents, not less than a bit of cooler?
My own Zoomer hasn’t worked her way around to Suits yet. But she has spent the past couple of years on a nonstop binge, working her way through all 19 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy several times over and currently landing on the resolutely unhip ABC drama The Rookie. These shows aren’t classic comfort watches in the vein of Friends or The Office—the last episode of The Rookie I watched together with her ended with the hero getting spattered in a serial killer’s blood. But they’ve got just the correct amount of dramatic stakes, enough to supply a bit of jolt of adrenaline before bedtime, but nothing to disturb her sleep.
The very unhipness of these shows appears to be part of their appeal. Rather than wink at their very own contrivances in the manner of post–30 Rock sitcoms, they play it straight, giving viewers the satisfaction of getting ahead of the show—an obvious no-no in the constructing of true suspense, but perfect for young audiences still thrilling to their ability to identify familiar tropes a mile away. Streaming providers have been talking for years about their aim to supply “second-screen content”—shows that don’t require viewers to hit rewind in the event that they idly drift off while scrolling their phones. But few of them seem quite so determined to complete in second place.
For a generation brought up on streaming, old-fashioned network shows are greater than a novelty. They’re a window right into a bygone era, one not so distant as to be labeled problematic, but far enough back that they don’t come to it with built-in immunity to the curiosities of what was commonplace. I’ve never forgotten the way my daughter responded the first time she saw a industrial on live television. She wasn’t annoyed or impatient a lot as simply baffled, unable to wrap her toddler head around the concept that if we desired to keep watching, we’d simply should wait. The commercials that Hulu drops into The Rookie’s act breaks don’t draw the same incomprehension now—some of the most endlessly recycled have develop into almost welcome (the number of drug-ad theme songs we are able to sing along to!), and the rest provide a possibility to temporary her non-bingeing parents on which characters are sleeping with whom.
Unlike the heralds of Peak TV, these shows aren’t edgy or morally complex. They leave boundaries right where they stand, the envelope resolutely un-pushed. They’re brightly lit and boldly coloured, not obsessive about making scenes so dark you possibly can barely see them, then scolding you for not properly calibrating your TV set. They’re nearly extremely attractive people doing their jobs exceptionally well, then blowing off steam by having extremely attractive sex. In other words, they’re what, for the overwhelming majority of the medium’s life span, was known simply as “TV.”
In their rush to disrupt the way TV had been made for a long time (not to say dismantling the structures that guaranteed a gentle living to the people making it), the streamers missed a key part of its appeal, the kinds of bonds that viewers can form only once they’ve been watching a show for years on end. My daughter could be brought there by TikTok clips as a substitute of TV Guide, but she is getting from these shows what people at all times have: a sense of regularity in a turbulent world, the predictable arc of a 40-minute story played out by people who find themselves exceedingly nice to take a look at, for guaranteed seasons on end. The incontrovertible fact that these shows aren’t the ones their parents or prestige-pilled older cousins trade for cultural clout—oh my God, have you ever seen that episode of The Bear?—could be what makes them especially alluring. With a military of journalists always trawling for stories, the youth-culture-to-adult-attention pipeline is shorter than it’s ever been. But the uncool stays ripe for discovery, as novel today because it was unusual yesterday.
Credit : slate.com
