The most streamed TV show of 2023 wasn’t a cult classic or a critical darling. It was Suits, the glossy legal drama that has become a runaway hit on Netflix. The USA Network drama aired its last episode in the fall of 2019, bringing an unofficial end to the network’s era of breezy “blue-sky” dramas like Monk and Psych. But it became a surprise smash in 2023, topping Nielsen’s streaming charts for a record 12 weeks in a row and finishing the year with a cumulative 57.7 billion minutes—edging out the mark set by The Office in 2020, the first year Nielsen started releasing Top 10 charts.
The past several years have seen surges in viewership for shows like The Office, Friends, and Girls, as viewers found their way back to old favorites and new generations made the classics their own. But there hasn’t been a phenomenon quite like the one around Suits, elevating a midlist show all the way to the top of the heap. Even at their peak, the blue-sky shows were ubiquitous filler—Saturday Night Live built an entire game-show sketch around contestants’ inability to remember anything about the USA hit Burn Notice except the fact that it was on the air. (Guesses on its subject include “a sexy doctor who can start fires with his mind” and “a show about handsome firemen?”) But in a year when the promise of Peak TV seemed to be coming to an end, ubiquitous filler seemed to be the order of the day.
Yet, as Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall put it: “Why Suits? Why now?” There are simple explanations, like the show’s debut on Netflix and the fact that a network show with 134 episodes has a built-in advantage over short-run streaming originals when it comes to racking up overall minutes. Procedurals—workplace dramas that build most episodes around a problem of the week—are overwhelmingly the most popular series on broadcast TV: 2023’s Top 10 includes NCIS, FBI, Blue Bloods, Chicago Fire, and Fire Country. So it’s not surprising that streaming would follow the same pattern—or that featuring the future Duchess of Sussex among its cast might give Suits a wee boost in the awareness department. But while the audience that keeps those shows on the air (and, for the most part, on CBS) is famously graying, Suits has, as even a cursory browse through TikTok demonstrates, found a surprisingly robust fan base among Generation Z.
Zoomers’ embrace of Suits seems counterintuitive at first. Why would those of a generation with more content tailor-made for it than ever before—one with entire divisions of publishing and entertainment-making devoted to serving its needs—turn to a thoroughly mid series from the previous decade when they could be watching Heartstopper or The Summer I Turned Pretty? Aren’t children supposed to be, if not smarter or better than their parents, at least a little cooler?
My own Zoomer hasn’t worked her way around to Suits yet. But she has spent the past couple of years on a nonstop binge, working her way through all 19 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy several times over and currently landing on the resolutely unhip ABC drama The Rookie. These shows aren’t classic comfort watches in the vein of Friends or The Office—the last episode of The Rookie I watched with her ended with the hero getting spattered in a serial killer’s blood. But they’ve got just the right amount of dramatic stakes, enough to provide a little jolt of adrenaline before bedtime, but nothing to disturb her sleep.
The very unhipness of these shows seems to be part of their appeal. Rather than wink at their own contrivances in the manner of post–30 Rock sitcoms, they play it straight, giving viewers the satisfaction of getting ahead of the show—an obvious no-no in the building of true suspense, but perfect for young audiences still thrilling to their ability to spot familiar tropes a mile away. Streaming providers have been talking for years about their aim to produce “second-screen content”—shows that don’t require viewers to hit rewind if they idly drift off while scrolling their phones. But few of them seem quite so determined to finish in second place.
For a generation brought up on streaming, old-fashioned network shows are more than a novelty. They’re a window into a bygone era, one not so distant as to be labeled problematic, but far enough back that they don’t come to it with built-in immunity to the curiosities of what used to be commonplace. I’ve never forgotten the way my daughter responded the first time she saw a commercial on live television. She wasn’t annoyed or impatient so much as simply baffled, unable to wrap her toddler head around the idea that if we wanted to keep watching, we’d simply have to wait. The commercials that Hulu drops into The Rookie’s act breaks don’t draw the same incomprehension now—some of the most endlessly recycled have become almost welcome (the number of drug-ad theme songs we can sing along to!), and the rest provide an opportunity to brief her non-bingeing parents on which characters are sleeping with whom.
Unlike the heralds of Peak TV, these shows aren’t edgy or morally complex. They leave boundaries right where they stand, the envelope resolutely un-pushed. They’re brightly lit and boldly colored, not obsessed with making scenes so dark you can barely see them, then scolding you for not properly calibrating your TV set. They’re just about extremely attractive people doing their jobs exceptionally well, then blowing off steam by having extremely attractive sex. In other words, they’re what, for the vast majority of the medium’s life span, was known simply as “TV.”
In their rush to disrupt the way TV had been made for decades (not to mention dismantling the structures that guaranteed a steady living to the people making it), the streamers overlooked a key part of its appeal, the kinds of bonds that viewers can form only when they’ve been watching a show for years on end. My daughter might be brought there by TikTok clips instead of TV Guide, but she is getting from these shows what people always have: a feeling of regularity in a turbulent world, the predictable arc of a 40-minute story played out by people who are exceedingly pleasant to look at, for guaranteed seasons on end. The fact that these shows aren’t the ones their parents or prestige-pilled older cousins trade for cultural clout—oh my God, have you seen that episode of The Bear?—might be what makes them especially alluring. With an army of journalists constantly trawling for stories, the youth-culture-to-adult-attention pipeline is shorter than it’s ever been. But the uncool remains ripe for discovery, as novel today as it was ordinary yesterday.
