'Suits' Renewed For 10-Episode Final Season; Series Creator Addresses Rumored Cameo Of Meghan Markle
Zane Specter Litt is closing business in 2020. USA Network has renewed Suits for its final season with 10 episodes. Series creator Aaron Korsh also addressed the rumor about Meghan Markle's cameo in Season 9.
Legal drama Suits has been renewed for its last season but with only 10 episodes. It will be six episodes short of its previous outings, except for the pilot season which has 12 episodes.
In a statement, USA Network and SYFY president Chris McCumber thanked Korsh as well as the cast and crew of the TV series for their creativity and devotion to the show. Although the TV network did not offer an explanation as to why the show has been axed, some fans speculated that it could be due to its current ratings.
Apparently, Suits' viewership ratings decline after cast members Meghan Markle and Patrick J. Adams left the show at the end of Season 7. The current Season 8 averaged at 1.2 million viewers, which is a drop of 100,000 from the previous season.
Markle announced that she will exit the show after her engagement with Prince Harry was announced in November 2017. The actress becomes the Duchess of Sussex after she married Harry in May 2018.
As to the rumors that Markle will be making a cameo appearance in the final season of Suits, Korsh said it is too early to tell. Korsh admitted that at the moment, he doesn't know who among the original cast members will return next season.
Meghan Markle played the role of lawyer Rachel Zane, whose love interest is Adams' character, Mike Ross. Rachel and Mike got married in the Season 7 finale, which was aired just a few weeks before Markle's real-life royal wedding.
It has been rumored that Markle was offered a huge amount of donation to her chosen charity in exchange for her cameo appearance in the series finale. Korsh denied such report and stressed that he did not arrange millions to be donated to a charity in behalf of the former actress.
"I have not arranged for millions of dollars to be donated to anything on behalf of anyone so that I can tell you, but as far as the original people coming back including Jessica (Gina Torres), we're so early in the season that we haven't formulated what we want to do, so we can't reach out to people before we know what we want to do," he told CNN.
Suits Season 8 resume airing on January 23. New episodes air every Wednesdays at 10/9c on USA Network. The show stars Gabriel Macht (Harvey Specter), Rick Hoffman (Louis Litt), Sarah Rafferty (Donna Paulsen), Amanda Schull (Katrina Bennett) and Dulé Hill (Alex Williams). Grey's Anatomy alum Katherine Heigl joined the cast in Season 8 as lawyer Samantha Wheeler.