it must be pretty weird to be the Suits guys
been thinking about this one for a while
Do you ever think about how weird it must be to be the Suits guys? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you spend your time thinking about other stuff, like the price of groceries or what college your children might go to or how cool it would be if the Olympics added a slam dunk contest and home run derby. That’s fair. I think about that stuff, too, sometimes. Especially the last one. I would really like to see the shot put guys try to mash a few dingers and the high jump guys do some windmill dunks. But this is not the time for that. The time for that will be in a few weeks when the Olympics start and I lose my mind about it like I do every four years. This is the time to think about the Suits guys.
By “the Suits guys,” I mean Patrick J. Adams and Gabriel Macht, who played Mike and Harvey, respectively, on the USA series that ran from 2011-2019. What a wild run it’s been for them over the last five or six years. Look at some of the highlights here:
Suits ended its eight-year basic cable run
A year later, COVID hit and the world stopped
Macht went on an extended hiatus and Adams kind of bebopped around the streaming services on other shows (The Right Stuff, A League of Their Own, etc.)
Out of nowhere, in 2023, Suits went off like a rocket on Netflix, making them two of the most recognizable people in America despite neither of them appearing in any major project for the last four years
As soon as that happened, the actors and writers went on strike and the whole industry shut down again
Also, one of their former castmates became a Duchess. That’s another thing that happened. And then they appeared in a Super Bowl commercial. Which is really just a wild run, going from moderate fame to “struggling to book roles while their former coworker moved into a castle and got hounded by international paparazzi” to “massively famous while on strike and unable to book new roles or do publicity for anything” to “fronting a million-dollar advertisement campaign for T-Mobile.” An absolute tornado. I wonder if they wake up some mornings and have to wrap their heads around it all fresh.
This is the thing that drove it all home for me, though.
What we have here is a 30-second shortened version of the full commercial they starred in. And here’s why it’s notable to me: they don’t even introduce themselves or make any reference to who they are or why they’re starring in a commercial! They’re just… there… in suits. And T-Mobile is banking on that being enough! A billion-dollar corporation is basically saying “we feel pretty confident that you know who these guys are, to the degree we’re just going to have them goof off in a garage and assume you get it.” Which is… weird! Tina Fey introduces herself in her commercials and she’s been famous for decades. The Scrubs guys have to sing a song with Jason Momoa. Someone says Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name in his State Farm commercial and he was both The Terminator and the Governor of California. But these two just make some noises and faces for a while and then we all move along. That’s how famous they are now. A major wireless provider just assumes your mom and dad know who Harvey and Mike are because they’re wearing the suits they wore on Suits.
I know there’s been a lot of talk about “the Suits effect” and what it means for television as an industry and how streaming can launch otherwise forgettable and forgotten shows into the stratosphere, and that’s another conversation we can have later, maybe after the one about adding dunks and dingers to the Olympics, but… still.
It’s weird…
And it must be weird…
You know…
To be the Suits guys.
STUFF I TYPED
— welllllllll guess who is doing a House of the Dragon blog at Vulture every week during season two (it’s me)
— my new weekly Five Spot edition of this newsletter, which went out on Friday for paid subscribers but opens with an extended section about shark movies that is free for everyone
STUFF I CLICKED ON
— my friend and former editor Keith Phipps wrote a wonderful tribute to his mother, and seeing movies, and seeing movies with his mother
— Rachael Handler got to hang out with June Squibb and I am pretty jealous about it
— here’s a terrific blog about Angel Reese and the WNBA, which is compelling television if you are into sports
— speaking of sports, this was the best tribute to baseball icon Willie Mays that I read after his passing last week
— speaking of baseball, Matt Gelb wrote the hell out of this profile of Kyle Schwarber, with some quotes at the end that are juuuuust about perfect
— speaking of my beloved Phillies, here’s a screencap I took while watching a game last week that I will absolutely not explain
— I must taste the disgusting historical cherries
— I cannot believe we are not making a bigger deal about basically curing HIV, and yes, I am part of the problem seeing as I put this link below the picture of the Phanatic and his inflatable friends
— Woody Harrelson got into a motorcycle accident and had his wounds treated by Ted Danson
— mariachi cover of “Higher” by Creed
— the AI drive-thru experiment at McDonalds did… not go well
— “sex-crazed zombie cicadas on speed” is a phrase I read that will stick with me for a while
— I know I just posted a screencap from Extraordinary last week but I am doing it again because this sweet man is my favorite character on television and I need you to watch so you can know what his name is
Okay, that’s good for this week. Please share and subscribe and think about the Suits guys.
I will not watch House of Dragons, but I will read a weekly Grubbian take on it.