After months of anticipation, Suits' ninth and final season joined Netflix on July 1, 2024, completing the series for fans. Despite a strong start with 2.5 million unique viewers and ranking in Netflix's top 15 titles, Season 9's viewership was half that of Season 1. Only 39% completed the final season in its first week. Peacock benefited from holding exclusive rights to all seasons, seeing a 514% increase in Season 9 viewership after its Netflix release.
After so many months, the wait is over for avid Suits fans. The ninth and final season of the legal drama has finally joined the Netflix catalog and, starting July 1, 2024, Suits enthusiasts can complete their binge-watching experience with the series finale.
Suits is a legal drama series that follows Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), a top New York lawyer, and his brilliant associate Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams), who, despite lacking a law degree, possesses an exceptional legal mind. The series originally aired on USA Network from 2011 to 2019.
In June 2023, the show debuted on Netflix but due to pre-existing streaming rights agreements, only Seasons 1-8 were available on the platform while the final season remained exclusive to other platforms such as Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. The show has gained a tremendous revival in popularity since it began streaming on Netflix in 2023, so much that it was announced one of Netflix’s biggest licensed shows of all time. However, fans had to either head over to Peacock or Prime Video to watch the final season or wait until it makes its way to Netflix. Now, when the series finale is available, we had to ask:
Well, in a way, yes. Looking at the overall performance on Netflix in the United States, it had a very good start. Within the first week of its release, Season 9 of Suits was watched by almost 2.5 million Unique Viewers and landed in Top 15 of all titles and Top 10 of all series watched on Netflix during that period which means that it performs better than 75% of Comedy series on Netflix in the US in 2023.
However, compared to a tremendous performance of the first season, the viewership was half as high.
Also when we look at the Completion Rate, the series finale falls behind the earlier seasons despite the excitement surrounding its release. 39% of viewers watched the entire Season 9 within the first 7 days after the release. For comparison, within the same time period, Season 5 was completed by 44% of viewers and Season 6 was completed by around 50%. This is surprising especially since both Season 5 and Season 6 consisted of 16 episodes while Season 9 included only 10.
Still, the final season seems to be performing well on Netflix, even though the previous seasons are a tough competition.
Although Suits experienced a huge resurgence in popularity after it was released on Netflix, which some call a “Netflix effect” and some a result of shortage of other new releases at that time due to writers’ strike, Peacock also saw some positive effects from the streaming success of Suits.
As we can see above, in September 2023, so 3 months after Suits premiered on Netflix, there was a 514% increase in the viewership of Season 9 on Peacock, compared to February 2023 when it was watched by only 76,000 Unique Viewers. This means that the strategic move of keeping the rights to all seasons was successful for the platform, and might have attracted Netflix’s subscribers that sought out alternative services to watch the series finale. In fact, Peacock’s ace in the hole may also be that the new spinoff show, Suits L.A., is in the works and will be available on Peacock only.