The star of a high-profile NBC reboot of a fan-favorite TV show is speaking out about its swift cancellation… proving that not even a sharp suit could save it from the axe.
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On a recent episode of the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast, Stephen Amell opened up about his time on Suits LA, the failed spinoff of Suits.
In the 2025 show, Amell portrayed Los Angeles attorney Ted Black, a friend of Gabriel Macht’s Harvey Specter, the main character from the original series on USA Network.
The series was infamously canceled before the first season finale even aired.
Amell got candid about the show’s poor performance on the podcast, shouldering some of the blame for its failure to launch.
Amell admitted the series simply “wasn’t good enough” to earn a longer lifespan, somberly adding, “Anything that ends not on your terms is a failure.”
“Ultimately, I think that the blame rests with me,” the beloved Arrow actor added.
“Whatever problem you have with the show — because I think that there were issues — it’s my job to solve those, to smooth them over and to gloss them up with some type of performance or something that, tangible or otherwise, covers up those mistakes,” Amell continued. “Because you do something that is magnetic, that is charismatic, that fixes those problems. And I didn’t do that.”
“I didn’t find anything ultimately with Ted Black, that character, that translated, that smoothed those things over, that gave us a chance to keep going,” he added.
Stephen Amell Also Pointed Out Problems with the Network Hindering ‘Suits LA’
Amell also attributed some problems to a difference in vision between NBC and the show’s creator, Aaron Korsh.
“A lot of what he wanted to do seemed to run up against what the network wanted,” the actor continued. “It seems like they just … I don’t want to say they battled, because I wasn’t a part of those conversations, so I’m not going to speculate. But it just seemed like what he wanted to do and what they wanted to do were different.”
“We certainly thought that we were gonna have another [season] and we’d get to work out some of those issues, and it just so happened that they went, ‘Nope, we’re gonna pull the plug,’” Amell revealed. “If it’s successful, I’m gonna get a disproportionate amount of the credit, and so I think it’s only fair that I stand in front and I take the blame. I’m the lead of the series, and it didn’t work.”
Next up for Amell is yet another reboot of a beloved NBC TV show… Baywatch.