Turns out Barney from How I Met Your Mother was right all along: people love Suits. Like… a lot. Not the garment, which has slipped out of favor in recent years, but the 2010s basic cable legal drama now most notable for producing Duchess of Sussex and ex-Spotify podcaster Meghan Markle.
In fact, people love Suits so much that the series has just broken Nielsen’s streaming record for most minutes viewed in a single week. (The show, which originally aired on USA Network, is now streaming on both Netflix and Peacock.) That’s over 3.1 billion minutes of Suits viewed in a single week. In case you missed it: billion. Nine whole zeroes. In a single week! That’s… a lot of minutes of Suits, and a whole lot more than Manifest, which previously held the record for most viewed acquired series in a single week at a measly 2.5 billion viewing minutes (per Deadline). But… why?
You already know the short answer: people just really love Suits. As they should! It’s a fun, engaging show about beautiful people winning cases, having affairs, and being shady. What’s not to love? It also runs a whopping nine seasons and 134 episodes, an increasing rarity in a streaming climate defined by axing and disappearing. Watching a show that’s already over (and ended relatively well, or at least in a way that didn’t undo everything that came before) can be a major comfort in an increasingly unstable world. Just look at The Office, which has also consistently sat atop Nielsen leaderboards for several years now. People crave comfort and familiarity, and Suits absolutely falls into that bucket.
Suits may also feel extra familiar now, in a post-Succession world. While the field may be different, the dress code is mostly the same (minus Kendall’s silly little blue hat) and we miss it! It’s fun to run around a chic New York high-rise with a whole new (or familiar, depending on which rewatch this is) crew.
But the real headline, of course, is Meghan Markle, who famously had to kiss a couple of fake lawyers before finding her prince. For Meghan fans, this is a fun origin story (far more fun than anything Marvel has put out recently), and—if an inside source at Netflix is to be believed—may be the only televised content we’re getting from the ex-Royal any time soon. All of which is to say, it may be a great time for anyone not participating in this phenomenon to get on board and Suits up already.
