Suits Showrunner Lied To Fans In A Desperate Attempt To Cover Up Finale Spoilers
This post contains spoilers for the series finale of "Suits."
Suits" ran for nine whole seasons, and the show's finale was a bittersweet one. A lot of loose ends were tied up, core characters had to make some difficult choices, and Harvey (Gabriel Macht) settled a final score with Faye Richardson (Denise Crosby) in an attempt to loosen her grasp over the firm. There were two weddings — one was expected, while the other was a surprise — and the story ended on a rather positive note for Mike (Patrick J. Adams) and Harvey, who decide to work together as a unit in Seattle. Now, four years after the series finale aired, fans of the show continue to express their love for the prolonged journey shared with the beloved characters and how these stories culminated into something meaningful.
Nothing about the series finale was last-minute, as "Suits" creator Aaron Korsh preplanned respective character routes very early on. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2019, Korsh explained that "once Harvey and Donna got together, [he] was never going to break them up," and that he was solely focused on meshing plotlines seamlessly to facilitate the ending he had in mind. Even the decision to reunite Mike and Harvey made sense for Korsh while he was filming season 8, as it was interesting to grant Harvey the autonomy to choose to do the right thing while still crossing lines when required.
However, before the series finale aired, some of these major plotlines got leaked ahead of time. Korsh, in an attempt to divert attention from these leaks, was forced to plant doubts into the minds of viewers by claiming that some last-minute changes were being made. Thankfully, it worked, and people were still pleasantly surprised by the emotionally resonant nature of the finale.
Salvaging the Suits finale
In a 2019 interview with Deadline, Korsh clarified that his tweet about last-minute changes to the series finale before it aired was just meant as a countermeasure for major spoilers that revealed key plot points in the episode:
"[...] Our promo department made a mistake and they spoiled both Donna and Harvey getting engaged and Donna and Harvey getting married, and one of our extras to some degree spoiled Harvey leaving the firm with the final name of the firm. So, so many things in my mind had been spoiled that I decided to say, I made some big last-minute changes just to throw some doubts into some fans' minds but I didn't make any big last-minute changes."
While fans might have believed Korsh's deliberate misdirection at the time, the series creator never had any alternative ending in mind even before the leaks, and the broad strokes of the story were pretty much set in stone. Sure, Korsh and his team of writers had to figure out certain story developments to trigger the preordained ending. For instance, during Louis (Rick Hoffman) and Shiela's (Rachael Harris) wedding, the latter goes into labor and is rushed to the hospital. The emotional nature of this precarious situation spurs Harvey to propose to Donna, as he chooses to leave nothing to fate.
This series of events also allowed Korsh to introduce high stakes before everything was inevitably resolved, with new, bittersweet beginnings on the horizon. In the end, all is well.