Having spent much of this week languishing at home with flu (I write this from my sick bed because I am a martyr), wrapped in a blanket with a hot water bottle like an old lady, I was not expecting it to be the week that I discovered that I have something in common with Gen Z.
It was reported this week that the most streamed show of 2023 wasn’t The Bear, or Succession, or that thing about the Yorkshire Ripper – it was… Suits. A long-running show about hotshot lawyers being shithot at their jobs and having hot (definitely not shit) sex, that aired its last episode on its original channel, USA Network, in 2019.
For reasons initially obscure, four years later, after landing on Netflix, it topped the Nielsen streaming charts for 12 weeks in a row – a record – with 57.7 billion minutes. It’s glossy, sure, and sexy and fun, but it’s hardly appointment TV. Even when everyone was talking about the Duchess of Sussex, pictured, (who was in it, in case you didn’t know), nobody was talking about Suits.
It was one of the last of USA Network’s so-called “blue sky” dramas, which had no particular genre but great characters, terrific ensemble casts and a long, overarching narrative sweep – and when it was over, that really seemed to be that.
But by 2023, Suits was all over TikTok. Specifically endless clips of lawyer Harvey (Gabriel Macht) and secretary-plus Donna (Sarah Rafferty) quipping at each other in his office like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn if they were dressed by Reiss and drank only out of vast takeaway coffee cups.
Suits is not my particular poison, I must admit. But I do appreciate the appeal of the procedural – a show where each episode has its own story (like a legal case, or murder investigation, or a bunch of women about to give birth), while each series follows a longer arc in the stories of the central characters. And apparently Gen Z is obsessed with them too.
I suspect it’s for the same reason that I’m currently smashing Silent Witness on BBC iPlayer, a crime drama focusing on a group of forensic pathologists (lots of traipsing about crime scenes in paper suits and poking bodies on slabs) that started in 1996 with an entirely different cast, and which I haven’t watched for over a decade and never without my mother.
I started a couple of weeks ago, out of idle curiosity, because it popped up for me after an episode of Call the Midwife (a rather cosier example of a procedural drama, with nuns and midwives and births instead of pathologists and gruesome murders).
Oh, it’s just a great show isn’t it? Discovering that Silent Witness is in its 27th season (27!) I started randomly at 26, and am now simultaneously enjoying both the 27th, as it unfolds week on week, and the 24th (which is the one at the end of which Nikki and Jack, two of the senior pathologists, finally get together. I Googled that — I wasn’t going to start again at the beginning and watch season after season of fruitless flirting, I’m not insane).
You might wonder why something that so clearly follows a formula would hold the attention of not just me but enough people to keep it going for nearly 20 years, but I think what I love about it is precisely that familiarity.
As long as you can stomach looking at, well, stomachs (and the rest), each two-part mystery canters along, exquisitely unfolding clue by clue, under-the-fingernails DNA sample by blood spatter pattern until it’s resolved.
You also don’t need to pay that much attention (except when characters are using sign language, or Yiddish, which is currently quite often, so I do have to put my phone down), because you know exactly at which moment in a conversation the key piece of information is going to land.
At the same time, the central characters are warm, likeable and just complex enough to keep you rooting for them and invested in their domestic dramas. But crucially, the element of surprise and anxiety is kept to a minimum by the faithful rounding out of each story, meaning that when I go to bed, my mind – so often racing after the consumption of a tricksy, anxiety-inducing, virtuoso drama like The Bear – remains serene enough to go to sleep. Stomachs notwithstanding.
I wonder if this is why Gen Z love Suits and shows like it so much: anxiety is everywhere. They need comfort. So do I. TV doesn’t have to be Great Art, but it is an art.
It’s a real skill, narratively, to put together something for 27 seasons, to create a whole world which refers back on itself for the fans but never excludes new viewers, that keeps people interested with great new characters when old ones must inevitably move on, that does the same damn thing week after week while being somehow endlessly but modestly inventive and new.
I think it’s amazing, and I’m impressed with it every time. And I sleep like a baby.
