Stephen Amell Blames Himself for “Suits L.A.” Cancellation After 1 Season
Stephen Amell Blames Himself for “Suits L.A.” Cancellation After 1 Season
Julia MooreTue, February 24, 2026 at 9:37 PM UTC
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Stephen Amell as Ted Black in "Suits LA" (left): Stephen Amell on the "Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum" podcast (right)
David Astorga/NBC; Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum
Suits L.A. was a short-lived Suits spinoff series that ran for just 13 episodes last year and was cancelled before the season 1 finale
Stephen Amell, who led the series, said on a recent podcast appearance that he believes the "blame rests with me" for the show's "failure," as he shared that creator Aaron Korsh also had doubts
"We certainly thought that we were gonna have another [season] and we'd get to work out some of those issues," Amell said
Stephen Amell is taking the blame for the cancellation of Suits L.A.
Amell starred as cocky Los Angeles attorney Ted Black, an old friend of Suits' Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), in the NBC spinoff series, which ran for one season last year and was cancelled in May.
From Amell's perspective, the show "wasn't good enough" to make it. "Anything that ends not on your terms is a failure," he said on the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast.
He went one step further, though, taking responsibility for the show's cancellation, as he said, "Ultimately, I think that the blame rests with me."
"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," he explained. "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,” Amell, 44, continued.
Josh McDermitt as Stuart Lane, Kristen Hager as Valerie, Troy Winbush as Kevin, Stephen Amell as Ted Black and Kevin Weisman as Lester Thompson in 'Suits LA'.
Jordin Althaus/NBC
Amell was apparently not the only one who doubted the spinoff's viability. According to him, Aaron Korsh, who created Suits —which ran from 2011 to 2019 and starred Patrick J. Adams, Meghan Markle and Sarah Rafferty —also questioned the show's longevity.
“When I saw the pilot of Suits L.A. — and this goes back to about a month after we finished shooting — I sat down with Aaron Korsh, who created Suits and Suits L.A., and he was editing the pilot. He was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work,’ " the father of two said.
"A lot of what he wanted to do seemed to run up against what the network wanted," Amell 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."
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The show's cancellation was "tough," the Arrow star continued, but ultimately noted that "it's also not anyone's fault."
"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.' "
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As for why he's adamant about taking some of the blame for its cancellation personally, Amell explained, "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."
Amell also said it's "ironic" that the spinoff was cancelled because filming it was "such a wonderful experience" and he "loved the people" involved.
Stephen Amell attends the premiere of "Suits LA"
Trae Patton/NBC
NBC president of programming strategy Jeff Bader told reporters in May that Suits L.A. had a "very short run" because it had "not resonated the way we thought it would," per The Hollywood Reporter.
“There can be many, many reasons — people are speculating why it hasn’t resonated, but it’s just not really showing the potential to grow for us in the future, unfortunately," he said. “Those are the decisions we have to make. We have to look at the performance of the shows both on linear and on digital.
"We have to see the ones that look like they have growth potential in the future," Bader continued. "So we’re looking at how stable they are in their linear performance, how stable they are on digital, which ones are growing, which ones are declining — and we had to make some hard decisions.”
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
