Why Suits Avoided Using Real Legal Cases In The Show
As someone who once served on a grand jury trial for several weeks in a row, allow me to be the first to inform the "Suits" fandom out there: real-life legal proceedings are usually boring, tedious, and mind-numbingly slow. Basically, they're everything that fictional legal dramas ought not to be, which is why countless movies and shows set in and around courtrooms — from "JAG" and "NCIS" to "Better Call Saul" and, yes, "Suits" – have had to resort to a little artistic license in order to punch up scripts and get viewers swept up in the action. That said, executive producer, writer, and series creator Aaron Korsh actually pulled the concept of the show straight from his own personal experience. After that, well, he relied on the imagination and creativity of his writing team to turn "Suits" into the sensation that it's become.
In a previous interview with Celeb Dirty Laundry, Korsh revealed how the premise for the show came into being. As it so happens, he borrowed heavily from his own pre-Hollywood days on Wall Street and, given that he actually had a boss named Harvey only a few years older than himself, it's easy to see how that led to the legal adventures of Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) and Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams). According to Korsh:
"My agent suggested to me that I write a show about my time — I worked on Wall Street as an investment banker for about [...] five years. So he said I was always telling him stories about those times, why don't I write something about that? [...] My first boss's name was Harvey. I was 21. He was about 26, but he seemed like so much older than me. So that's where the impetus for the show came from."
Suit yourself
So if Aaron Korsh (loosely) based the character of Harvey Specter on his old boss, then was Mike Ross supposed to be a version of himself? The answer is ... kind of! Although the "Suits" creator denies having a photographic memory, he explains, "I was able to do very well academically with little to no effort and it was both, I would say, a blessing and a curse. In some ways, I could do really well, but it put this pressure on me to do really well without trying. Or I kind of put that pressure on myself [...] to impress people and show them how smart I was." Yeah, that sounds a bit like Mike!
But that's where the blend between fact and fiction ended, for the most part. Both Harvey and Mike went on to become vastly different characters than they were in the first season, aided in large part by the many experiences they shared together. When asked whether "Suits" pulled from real-world cases, Korsh shot that down pretty quickly:
"We try not to use real cases just because [...] my rule has always been, it doesn't have to be real, it just has to seem real. Because sometimes the way it would be in reality is just not as interesting or exciting. So we try to stay away from real cases. Sometimes, obviously we'll know about a case or about something that will inspire us to use a little piece of something. But for the most part, we just make them up."
Whatever the ratio between fact and fiction was, clearly Korsh and his creative team did something right. "Suits" went on to become a runaway hit on Netflix and now we're looking at the possibility of another spin-off show. Not bad at all!