“Suits LA ”star Stephen Amell blames himself for season 1 cancellation: 'It wasn’t good enough'
“Suits LA ”star Stephen Amell blames himself for season 1 cancellation: 'It wasn’t good enough'
Shania RussellWed, February 25, 2026 at 6:25 PM UTC
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Stephen Amell as Ted Black on 'Suits LA'Credit: David Astorga/NBC
Stephen Amell is taking full responsibility for the "failure" of Suits LA.
During a visit to the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast, Amell admitted that he blames himself for the show's lack of success, which saw it canceled after a single season.
"It wasn't good enough," Amell told Rosenbaum. "I think that anything that ends not on your terms is a failure."
The NBC spinoff series, which last year attempted to capitalize on the unexpected resurgence of Suits, never really found its audience and was ultimately canceled before it even aired its season finale. Amell, who led the series as attorney Ted Black, pointed out that he noticed several "issues" during the early days of the show's production but added, "I think that the blame rests with me."
He explained, "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, to gloss them up with some type of performance or something that, tangible or otherwise, that covers up those mistakes. Because you do something that is magnetic, that is charismatic, that fixes those problems. And I didn't do that. I didn't find anything ultimately with Ted Black that translated, that smoothed those things over, that gave us a chance to keep going."
Stephen Amell as Ted Black and Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter in 'Suits LA'Credit: Nicole Weingart/NBC
As for why he felt the need to take the blame, Amell pointed out that as the face of the show, "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."
Comparing the show to his early experience with Arrow — an unmitigated success for the CW that spanned eight seasons and launched five spinoffs in the form of the expanded Arrowverse — Amell hinted that he knew from the beginning that Suits LA would be an uphill battle. In fact, the actor insisted he wasn't the only member of the team with concerns, citing a conversation he had with series creator Aaron Korsh.
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"I remember watching the pilot of Arrow and thinking, 'I don't know enough to know if I'm right' — and I probably still don't — 'but man, this feels really good,'" Amell recalled. "And when I saw the pilot of Suits LA, about a month after we finished shooting, I sat down with Aaron Korsh, who created Suits and Suits LA. He was editing the pilot, and he was like, 'I don't know if this is gonna work.'"
Amell went on to claim that Korsh butted heads with the NBC, adding, "A lot of what he wanted to do seemed to run up against what the network wanted. I don't wanna say they battled because I wasn't a part of those conversations, so I'm not gonna speculate. But it just seemed like what he wanted to do and what they wanted to do [was] different."
Representatives for NBC did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly's request for comment.
Josh McDermitt as Stuart Lane, Kristen Hager as Valerie, Troy Winbush as Kevin, Stephen Amell as Ted Black and Kevin Weisman as Lester Thompson on 'Suits LA'.Credit: Jordin Althaus/NBC
Amell said that in the end, the cats and creatives thought they were gonna have another season to "get to work out some of those issues" and were disappointed when the network pulled the plug.
Per THR, on a conference call with reporters one day after the show's cancellation, NBC’s President of Programming Strategy Jeff Bader said, "It’s so hard to talk about shows and which ones you bring back. Suits (LA) has 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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As its title implies, Suits LA moved the action of the original from the Big Apple to Tinseltown, and followed a new group of legal eagles led by Amell's Ted, who was revealed to have a connection to Suits' Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht, who recurred in several episodes on the spinoff). The series also saw Rick Hoffman reprise his fan-favorite character, the neurotic financial law partner Louis Litt, in the spinoff.
The spinoff came on the heels of Suits entering the zeitgeist in 2023. After arriving on Netflix and Peacock, the flagship show unexpectedly broke streaming records and topped Nielsen's streaming charts for months on end in the midst of the Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes essentially halting production and postproduction on new shows.
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