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claudia1832 · 6 months ago

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Someone spoke up my mind! It’s so frustrating to see Mike’s character settings that had so much potential at the beginning never really getting dug into. There could have been many great plot lines with this character’s ability/personality/background. Instead the writers just made these settings become more and more meaningless and let the character building crash and burn…

The Enshittification of Mike Ross: An Exasperated Ramble Masquerading as a Character Study and Marvey-Flavored Suits Meta

premise: the narrative and story-quality problems endemic to suits as a show are rooted in— and can thus be analyzed through— the gradual unraveling of its co-lead’s characterization. which, i argue, unraveled largely because of the show’s insistent refusal to substantively address the political-economic implications of its (ludicrous, yet compelling) narrative framework.

premise rephrased: mike became an insufferable asshole in general by s4 because the show twisted itself into tortured knots trying to avoid engagement with class/labor politics— and not only was that annoying in its own right, it also soured the show’s core love story relationship between mike and harvey, and thus took everyone and everything down with it.

additional underlying premise: marvey gave me brainworms and they’re incurable so now i’m making it everyone’s problem!

content warning: i do not know, and in fact have never known, when or how to shut the fuck up, so i have A Lot To Say here on my own goddamn blog about capitalism and blorbos. you’ve been warned, so proceed at your own peril.

/cracks knuckles

suits is honestly such an odd duck of a show. it was reasonably popular in its heyday on a decidedly second-tier television network during the golden age of (often law-enforcement related) workplace procedurals— but it got a massive, unexpected, and (importantly) organic second life through digital streaming, because (i believe) the rapid shift in the entertainment industry to “ambient content” and content-dump full-season releases has made people miss the comforting length/consistency of procedurals.

additionally, suits was originally aired not long after a massive fucking american and global recession caused by the rank systemic greed and incompetence of the very industry/people it depicted— but USA Network specialized in light-as-air, don’t-think-and-don’t-worry-about-it popcorn television, which intentionally handwaved such arbitrary considerations as Logic, or frankly Morals in general.

so when the pilot aired in 2011, there was every reason for everyone— from showrunner aaron “i didn’t have an ending in mind when we started” korsch, to the audience, to the characters themselves— to just… Go With It. mike and harvey’s silly little fraud scheme was not supposed to be Realistic or have Larger Societal Implications. the Buddy (Cop) Comedy™️ is an established american genre with a long, rich cultural history. the exploitative tentacles of capitalism had americans, and the world, in a chokehold deathgrip, but that shit is sooo complicated, and suuuch a drag, and anyway we’re all tired and busy trying to survive it so yeah, sure, why not turn our brains off and simply enjoy the Shenanigans?

i say that with complete empathy/implication of myself, by the way: i’m a fan, and i started watching during the pandemic Suits Renaissance because i’m as burnt out and starving for easy distracting entertainment as anyone.

but by season 3, which aired in 2013-2014, something Else started happening. and it was really coming from suits’s creative team, more than any Larger Cultural Mores, and that makes it extra fascinating.

enter into evidence Exhibit A: mike “that goddamn kid” ross.

when the pilot began, mike was the audience’s pov character. technically speaking, louis and harvey and jessica (and gerald tate) were the first people we actually met. but mike was our real avatar— the Everyman Millennial in the form of an under-achieving, pot-smoking, bike-riding peter pan unsure of how to grow up. [side note: WILD, from a 2024 perspective, how much the culture has shifted on marijuana in thirteen years. legalize it and free the prisoners!]

we met the ruthless hotshots of manhattan corporate law first as a kind of extended establishing shot, in order to establish the crass archetypes and rationalities we would soon be subverting/unpacking/ultimately thwarting through the rest of the show. harvey’s penthouse in the clouds and jessica’s office window overlooking the tops of glittering skyscrapers weren’t Real Life. mike, sitting on the floor, vowing for the millionth day in a row to get his shit together while trevor blithely noshed on a cheeseburger from monday was what was grounded, literally, in reality. mike ross was supposed to be us: broke as a joke, worried about his grandma’s ailing health, cognizant that he wasn’t living up to his potential but too stressed/in survival mode to do more than just “go pay them another month. [insert irreverent bro handshake here]”

the key thing here that the pilot gestured to, but that the rest of the show couldn’t follow through on, was that the real villain of suits from the jump was the dystopian privatized american health care system. yes, trevor is a bastard and mike’s naivety/bad luck got him kicked out of college— but ultimately capitalism is what kept mike so scrambled and distracted in his early twenties, as grammy’s health worsened and he, presumably, was the one financially supporting them both.

remember, it was not some inherent delinquency that drove mike to take trevor up on The Pot Deal That Started It All. it was the need to pay out of pocket for his grandmother’s care facility— lest she be transferred to an under-funded state-run facility that would jeopardize her life through neglect that is technically illegal but functionally a reality.

mike was poor, and being poor is fucking expensive in america. especially in new york city. as harvey put it in another context: “once you’re behind the eight ball, you’ll never be able to get ahead.”

and that is some bleak shit!! but of course, mike’s desperation— in true early-2010s USA Network fashion— was treated with the lightest possible touch, plus airbrushed over with cute puppy-eyed hints of a future romance arc with jenny.

which means that the opening scenes of the pilot are the first and last time the show’s writing ever deals explicitly with mike’s working-class class position.

and that intentional narrative erasure is what sets the conditions for mike to devolve into a terrible fucking character by s4 and onward.

hear me out!! (it’s a multi-part argument but i swear it comes together.)

we are meant to sympathize with mike from the jump because he’s an orphan AND because he’s poor. but especially when he starts making that corporate law money— the show positions him as sympathetic only because he’s an orphan, because presumably he’s not poor anymore. he lives in his old shitty apartment for a couple of years, then moves into the gorgeous apartment he bought for grammy and shortly after that settles into the bougie investment banker life.

but… none of that can, or should, erase the way growing up working class would have hard-wired mike’s brain in specific, and specifically political, kinds of ways.

yet, because the show refuses to ever fully go there— to actually criticize the global structures of capitalism that kept mike struggling and harvey comfortable— the only options left to flesh out mike’s character are frustratingly apolitical, and thus quite unsympathetic.

and if we the viewers can’t sympathize with mike, then the central premise of the show— that harvey and mike deserve to be legal partners in every way together, at increasingly any cost— completely falls apart.

there was still room to sympathize with mike in s1-3, even when he snapped at harvey or jerked rachel around. because he was working such long hours, learning the cultural as well as legal ropes of corporate law, and flailed around like a scrappy underdog in a vicious ivy-league shark tank. no one else cared enough to wonder if “the pretty paralegal” they dumped research work on had hopes & dreams, let alone if they could take the time to help her achieve them when they could be focused exclusively on their own ladder-climbing. mike didn’t have any associate friends at work except harold (whom everyone picked on) because they were all jealous of “the golden boy” and thus didn’t really treat him like a person. and as much as mike was smarter/more capable of everyone else in the room, anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of experiencing corporate/elitist culture knows how much it can nevertheless feel like you’ll never truly Belong there, no matter what you are able to accomplish, because exclusivity is premised on exclusion on ultimately arbitrary grounds.

and like. mike was still Precocious Protégé™️ and Puppyboy™️— someone who hid stacks of pro-bono files in his bottom drawer that he worked “on his own time” even though we know perfectly well he only has maybe five (5) minutes of “his own time” every other week. those kinds of details are genuinely endearing. as was the way mike fell apart when grammy died. his grief was both raw and universal. he was someone you could root for to “get his shit together” and grow as a person.

but everything changed when the fire nation eric woodall attacked.

the end of s3/into s4 is really the turning point of the show in so many ways, and it’s where i argue everything really goes wrong.

canonically, mike asking lola jensen to “hack into the bar” (whatever that entails) for him is A Gesture from mike to harvey, committing them to each other. and while i guess that’s romantic proof of loyalty if you’re an emotionally stunted white man whose love language is felony crime, it’s also still. you know. felony crime. and should sit uneasy for us as an audience because while we’re having fun & hijinks over here, we’re getting perilously close to breaking even a generous suspension of disbelief.

mike’s initial fraud could walk the line less awkwardly (albeit not by much) because the spirit of licensing requirements are meant to protect clients from bad actors, and at least mike had enough expertise and professional integrity to do the job of zealously defending his clients. and who doesn’t love to school three floors worth of certified Harvard Douches™️ on the merits of their own hard work and savvy cultivated via Hard Knocks University?

but hacking into the bar just to cover mike’s ass, and also harvey’s and jessica’s, because now they’ve all become complicit in an actual conspiracy and simply don’t want to deal with any legal consequences for it?

that is…. decidedly not as cute.

and once mike becomes an investment banker— it honestly SHOULD have been fun & delicious to watch mike and harvey have outrageous foreplay documented on the public record face off against each other on a case in court, student vs. teacher equalizing as peers for a big half-season-long legal spectacle of unresolved sexual tension. but it wasn’t, really, in s4. for me at least, it was an anxiety- and cringe-inducing experience.

mike and harvey didn’t have an actual battle of wits. they played low, dirty, and overly personal. it was downright cruel of mike to drag harvey’s father’s masters into the equation when he knows that he is one of precious few humans in the universe that harvey has confided in about his past.

mike doesn’t owe harvey his soul in servitude forever for being his mentor. but again— we are now edging into outright ingratitude towards a man who, while flawed, has tangibly put himself on the line many, many times for mike out of a sincere desire to help him achieve his dreams.

making the conflict Personal between them fundamentally misunderstands them as characters, and misunderstands the world their story is set in. the real conflict/tension between mentor and mentee— which the show gestures to with cameron dennis and does, to its credit, try hard to drive home in s6-7 though the attempt falls far short on execution— is that harvey is a “one-percenter” who has largely avoided questioning his luxurious class position, and mike is a “ninety-nine percenter” who has personal experience with poverty that harvey never did. (2011 when the pilot aired coincided with the year of the occupy movement.)

except, again: the show doesn’t actually make that a class issue. instead, the show individualizes and personalizes and thus sanitizes it to the point of incoherence. which renders mike a raging asshole and hypocrite instead of the actually decent person he had the potential to become in s1-3.

it isn’t enough to say, as the show parrots to the point of exasperatingly thin platitude by s7, that mike is Better Than Harvey because he “cares” and “wants to help people.” by s7 especially, harvey’s character arc has evolved to the point where it has become abundantly clear that harvey also cares and wants to help people. the difference is that harvey mostly cares about and wants to help the elites in his circle and on his client list. but without giving mike any genuine moments of working class solidarity— no nurses unions, no overworked underpaid literary assistants, no single-mom support staffers suffering sexual harassment, no gabby stones (she wanted to be a teacher, she counts)— we don’t see the essential class consciousness underlying a desire to help the actual working public. and we therefore don’t see why harvey would believe that mike is a better man.

and. to clarify. we did get a version of what i’m saying i wanted during the clinic arc. like with the woman who couldn’t pay her rent, and the class action that mike won. but mike was so damn insufferable, acting entitled and self-righteous, and the cases themselves were so thinly developed— and mike could only work at that clinic because harvey paid an obscene amount of money for it to be possible— that none of that worked the way it should have. there was a lot of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance going on, and the show knew it, but it was a mess rather than a messy exploration. (i also disliked oliver intensely, but that’s neither here nor there.)

especially when harvey is evolving as he is on the personal level (learning how to be jessica’s successor, sometimes doing better by louis as a friend, finally going to therapy and trying to heal his family trauma) (do not Start Me on the appalling dating-his-therapist plotline, i’m writing that one off as a wash of plain bad writing as well as the homophobic Heterosexual Imperative to give harvey “pining for mike ross” specter a female love interest because it had been a while since scottie who also canonically got run off because of the pining-for-mike-ross agenda) — mike’s overt lack of class conscious ends up actually robbing him of his humanity. which leaves the character in a corner he can’t come back from.

to reiterate that another way: mike had the potential to be an interesting-but-flawed character we could root for, but terrible writing decisions turned him into the worst version of himself. and while the show did actually acknowledge this sometimes— most notably in 5x10– it could never quite bring itself to condemn this version of mike as he deserved, as the putrid trial arc and post-prison clinic arc amply demonstrated. mike kept believing his own bullshit when testifying/representing himself. his decision to take anita gibbs’s deal “to save harvey and the firm” was not some noble martyr’s cause— harvey was as much if not more at fault for the initial fraud as mike because he was the one with the power to enable it, but mike did the federal crime of defrauding the bar himself, and while jessica/louis/donna/rachel were all varying degrees of complicit in the coverup, none of them would’ve been in jeopardy at all if mike hadn’t been a damn fraud in the first place. so it was correct that he, if anyone, take the fall and go to jail. and letting harvey run himself/his own morals into the ground, got to the point of practically taking advantage of harvey’s mingled guilt and affection.

to be clear: harvey had things he could stand to feel guilty about (like hiring mike as an associate in the first place, then not cutting him loose when he could have, and emotionally manipulating him into “not abandoning him” by obtaining literally any other legal form of employment). but the way a guy who had standards for playing in the gray during the travis tanner and cameron dennis shenanigans, straight up Broke Laws during the hideous frank gallo arc? and mike had the audacity to give harvey shit for it? that was straight up painful to watch, and not in the compelling Imperfect Characters way. in the “what have the writers done to you” kind of way.

because when a character like harvey, whose character work was far more dynamic and nuanced, is falling on his sword for a character like post-s3 mike— it leaves a terrible taste in everyone’s mouths.

this goes double triple quadruple for the evil s7 development to let PJA out of the show in the worst possible way by having mike simply nope out after his own wedding with 0 days notice for the man he loved. yes, loved. i personally tend to mean it in a romantic way, but even by the show’s logic of familial, brotherly, platonic affection— it’s still love. and you don’t pull such a shenanigan on someone you love. it felt like something the writers did to mitigate the queerness so easily read into their relationship, but that kind of move doesn’t just kneecap both characters’ emotional/personal development. it actually cheapens the richness and depth and meaningfulness of non-romantic love itself.

i don’t know about you, but if i decided to suddenly drop a bomb like that on someone i worked closely with and considered my best friend— someone who was best man at my wedding— i think i would rightfully deserve jail.

[side note: i am not mad that jessica got disbarred for mike. it was annoyingly framed as a righteous character decision for her, but actually i never forgave her for what she admitted doing to that judge in law school, and she was a self-centered fool (in both the Imperfect Character and Bad Writing ways i’d say) to keep mike on post-2x01, so, she deserved to be brought down by her own hubris in the form of “that goddamn kid.” and also gina torres did deserve her own show, i just wish it were better!]

so you might be asking: how does one Solve A Problem Like Maria Mike Ross?

well. if it were up to me— the time to have changed course was right there at the end of s3. no bar hacking, and either 1) take the investment banking job but have him flame out on a better moral stance than annoying ass gillis (there’s no shortage of immoral bullshit on wall street) and when he’s in his helpless career flail, he could go self-employed as a legal consultant and just downplay the harvard name in his self-presentation, the way harvey used to pretend he never worked at the DA’s office—

or 2) actually do something interesting and morally courageous, and have mike turn himself in. if he hadn’t hacked the bar, it would’ve been a regular old state-level crime, and harvey has plenty of local contacts/clout to help mike cut a deal for no prison time in exchange for something or another. and not only would that resolve mike’s moral cognitive dissonance on the side of integrity, it would let mike/the audience grapple with the ways in which— bringing the capitalism point full circle— no one ever went to jail for the goddamn Great Recession, but mike is the criminal for practicing law without a license.

what counts as criminality under the law— based on what’s provable, and how good your corporate bulldog lawyer is— and what we can then do as individuals to try and, not just survive but meaningfully mitigate the system, is an infinitely more important and compelling moral/political/legal/economic conundrum than anything the writers room threw at mike and harvey after s3.

but that would require us to actually name capitalism and capitalist violence for what they are.

and the whole reason i wasted chose to spend this much time writing all of these words out— is because this show really could have done that. the seeds were all there from the beginning, but the long-form narrative ambitions of s3 onwards— the seriousness and sheer darkness of s5 and s6– prove that the writers’ room had the capacity and the willingness for a significant degree of self-awareness. and i think from my current vantage of witnessing this Chic Capitalist Critique moment (white lotus and succession on tv, movies like knives out and the menu) and how far queer representation in the mainstream has come— maybe suits came into the world too early to fully realize its potential.

which isn’t to say we’re Properly Enlightened as a society about capitalism or homophobia now. emphatically we are not and there is a lot of work to do before the planet fully overheats. but it is to say that… suits is an odd duck of a show, and it’s given me a lot of really fun food for thought, and for that alone i am grateful it took its big swings, whether they worked or didn’t.

but if the creatives involved do decide to capitalize on their streaming renaissance and reboot/pick up suits in the near future: HASHTAG FREE MARVEY!!!!!!

(and if anyone [aaron? gabriel? patrick?] needs further Ideas on how to accomplish that, i’m happy to quit my day job and consult as long as they like!)

#suits

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