For all my eye-rolling at spinoffs, reboots and IP rehashing, I’ve to confess {that a} redux of Fits, the erstwhile USA Community present about well dressed hyper-smart legal professionals bickering well, is sensible enterprise. The unique sequence, which ran from 2011 till 2019, is the kind of present that linear tv used to excel at, and what streaming providers have lengthy struggled to copy: evenly serialized, an aspirational office drama with near-comically low stakes, glossy and attractive and simply second-screened. It was the present of the summer time in, of all years, 2023, practically half a decade after it wrapped its run and cultural eons away from the heyday of breezy, stunning so-called “blue sky” tv.
Given that everybody and their good friend was watching (or rewatching) Fits a year-ish in the past, it made sense, and was even possibly promising, that NBC greenlit Fits LA, a by-product set in a by some means even sunnier surroundings than the unique’s unrecognizably shiny imaginative and prescient of New York (through Toronto). As an unique sequence watcher carried again by the Netflix resurgence, I, too, was looking forward to an extension of the present’s cheeky, intelligent, bad-but-fun spirit, a present that doubled down on the magnetic hyper-competence of a company lawyer like Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), continued the predominance of unrealistically attractive tailoring, and transcended the presence of a pre-Sussex Meghan Markle.
Sadly, Fits LA, once more created by Aaron Korsh, disappoints within the custom of many a community reboot. Like Frasier, How I Met Your Father and the Gossip Woman 2.0 earlier than it, the brand new Fits is an echo of the unique that neither embodies sufficient of its ethos to fulfill nor sufficiently differentiates itself to face alone. To be truthful, whereas the unique made the drudgery of company regulation unrealistically and definitively attractive, the brand new model takes on arguably an much more tough case: the work of leisure regulation. The place there was as soon as mergers, embezzlement and white-collar crime, there may be now contracts, movie-star schmoozing and one precise homicide involving a producer that’s so dry and unmoving it made me want they caught to negotiations of movie schedules.
Fits LA definitely has the items to succeed: within the custom of Harvey Specter, leisure lawyer Ted Black (Stephen Amell) is a fast-talking, quick-thinking, largely unflappable nearer of utmost confidence, with a eager sense of banter and, in fact, a fairly face. Within the custom of Patrick J Adams’ Mike Ross, a broke autodidact who fakes his approach right into a Harvard-only regulation agency on the expense of everybody’s belief for the remainder of the sequence, Ted additionally has some secrets and techniques – although not practically as endearing and rendered in shoddily deployed flashbacks to his 2010 New York life. (Not one of the three episodes offered for evaluation had been finalized for air, however I doubt shade correction can repair a stale aesthetic that’s notably drab within the 2010 scenes.) Like Gina Torres earlier than her, Erica Rollins (Lex Scott Davis) is an formidable careerist made ruthless by the company norm that Black girls should work twice as exhausting to get half as far, engaged in a struggle of egos and chemistry with comparatively laidback frenemy Rick Dodson (Bryan Greenberg). Everybody, sure, wears glorious fits (Erica specifically); there are compulsory photographs of tight pencil skirts sashaying away.
Spoiler tips prohibit a lot dialogue of the plot, which, within the spirit of the unique, shuffles the principle gamers round in a wheel of self-interest and delight. The present tries, largely unproductively, to wring thriller out of how Ted, a former federal prosecutor of mobsters turned leisure lawyer with essentially the most baldly said daddy points I’ve ever seen, strikes from New York to Los Angeles to arrange a agency with shut good friend Stuart Lane (Josh McDermitt), a former company lawyer turned prison protection lawyer (the apply of regulation is fungible, I assume).
The buddies open the present staring down a merger with one other store run by Ted’s very engaging ex Samantha (Rachelle Goulding). All of the whereas, Black Lane purchasers – all actors enjoying themselves, together with the late John Amos – move out and in of the workplace with a slew of actor-specific calls for that appear rather more compelling in principle than in apply. Good as he could also be, watching Brian Baumgartner, aka The Workplace’s Kevin Malone, search assistance on changing into an Oscar-winning dramatic actor doesn’t have fairly the identical intrigue as, say, going after an funding agency that ripped off a non-profit.
Crucially – and this actually the entire deal – not sufficient of this work is within the service of Fits’ bread and butter: characters verbally jockeying their approach via life, musical tête-à-têtes of outstanding timing and wit. There are flashes of that, reminiscent of when Ted and Erica acknowledge their mutual shark-ness, or when Erica takes on Rick, or when Erica offers with a much less straitened junior assistant (Alice Lee). Other than Erica, and an occasional good Ted Black second (Amell has the cadence and the jawline), the banter wilts greater than it zings. With out it, Fits LA is simply convoluted plot and unrealistically alert legal professionals – possibly baseline entertaining, however not attractive. With out it – after three episodes, at the least – this spinoff is simply enterprise.
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