Suits airs Tuesdays at 10/9C on USA Network, available through Comcast Cable!
“The Arrangement”
Okay, folks, full disclosure: this was my first time ever watching Suits. From what I can tell it’s a show about people who like to stab each other in the back and then complain about how disloyal everyone else is. And it’s damn entertaining. Let’s go.
So there’s this guy, Mike, who works as an associate at a law firm even though he never got his law degree. That much I knew. This is the beginning of season 3, and apparently Mike stabbed his mentor, Harvey, in the back at the end of season 2 by supporting Harvey’s arch rival, Jessica, for partner (because Jessica threatened to expose Mike’s lack of credentials). Mike is now trying to get back into Harvey’s good graces, but it’s proving difficult now that Jessica considers him her own personal puppet. He’s also trying to get with a cute paralegal, Rachel, who’s very angry at him because he’s got a fake Harvard law degree on his wall and she keeps hitting the old ivy ceiling. She thinks Mike should quit his job before his fraud is exposed and he ends up in jail.
The firm’s new partner, Edward Darby–who’s technically Jessica’s boss, since he owns 51% of the firm–wants Harvey to defend a family friend, Ava Hessington, against bribery charges that have been leveled at her and her oil company. Apparently Darby admires people who can lie through their teeth, since he gives Harvey the Hessington case on the strength of an outrageous bluff that Harvey pulled on the owner of the New Jersey Nets. (More full disclosure: I watched the basketball-bluff scene for like two minutes before realizing that Harvey and Nets-guy were actually talking about basketball rather than employing
an elaborate basketball metaphor to discuss lawyery things. Well done me!)
Mike, meanwhile, has not quit his job. (That seems predictable, ’cause I think that would mean the show was over, and we’ve got like 45 minutes to go at this point.) Instead, he starts digging up information on Ava Hessington, hoping Harvey will forgive him if he helps him win his case. Harvey, for his part, is sweet-talking some woman named Scottie so she’ll do his job for him, which she does. Some career advice for the ladies out there: don’t trade professional advancement for a roguish smile and a lame line like “you mean something to me.” (What does that even mean?)
As it turns out, Ava Hessington is 150% guilty of bribery and about ten other environmental, economic, and legal infractions, and the Justice Department official assigned to her case, Richard Jensen, is determined to nail her to the wall. Mike finally manages to uncover something Harvey doesn’t already know, which is that Jensen is running for office and his top campaign contributor is Hessington Oil’s main competitor. Harvey pressures Jensen to drop the case, but instead he recuses himself and assigns a special prosecutor, Cameron Jessup, who is apparently an old frenemy of Harvey’s played by Gary Cole with the world’s most amazingly awful mustache.
While all this is going down Mike has decided to come clean with Rachel: he tells her everything he’s gone through to get where he is in life. The audience doesn’t get to hear this story (I guess because the writers assume
that, unlike me, other people have been watching all along and know all about Mike’s sordid past), but not only does she forgive him for lying to her for two years and overlook the fact that he could be hauled off to prison at any moment, but she jumps into bed with him. That must be one hell of a story.
Anywho, there are other plots afoot, like Louis Litt’s feud with Nigel Nesbitt over who gets to be in charge of Uniballs and raspberry bran bars as well as who has the more alliterative name, and Harvey and Jessica’s attempts to one-up each other by alternately sucking up to and blackmailing Darby (who has a little secret about his special relationship with Ava Hessington’s father). I imagine this competition is an ongoing feature of the show, so I won’t get into it too much here because, as you can guess, I’m totally sticking with this series now that I’ve started it.