EXCLUSIVE: Picked up to series just a day after the 20th year anniversary of the Entourage premiere, NBC’s Suits: L.A. shares a lot more in common with the HBO showbiz comedy than a Los Angeles setting. They also both feature a main character inspired by — and named after — a top Hollywood agent.
Entourage‘s uber agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) being modeled after Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel is well established and part of TV lore. But it’s little known that the central character of Suits: L.A., Ted Black, played by Arrow alum Stephen Amell, was inspired by prominent CAA agent and former ICM Partners managing director Ted Chervin — and the project’s original incarnation was even titled Ted.
“Ted Black is Ted Chervin,” says Literate’s Dennis Kim, Suits and Suits: L.A. creator Aaron Korsh‘s former agent and current manager.
Suits: L.A.‘s official logline hints at the lead’s origins: The series centers on Ted Black (Amell), a former federal prosecutor from New York who has reinvented himself by representing the most powerful clients in Los Angeles.
Born and raised in Bronxville, N.Y. Chervin became a federal prosecutor in New York after graduating from Harvard Law, pursuing mobsters and other organized crime kingpins, including the head of Colombia’s Cali drug cartel. Then, at age 29, he quit his job and moved to Los Angeles to try and make it as a Hollywood talent agent. He started with an entry-level job at boutique lit agency Broder, Kurland, Webb, where he went on to become a name partner before its merger with ICM.
“I basically traded my Justice Department badge to try to become a real-life Ari Gold and enact my own real-life Entourage,” Chervin said during a TED Talk about his career pivot seven years ago.
This is not the first time part of Chervin’s life has inspired a part of a show: the characters J.D. (Zach Braff) and Turk (Donald Faison) on client Bill Lawrence’s comedy Scrubs, who are former college roommates, were based on Lawrence and Chervin’s college roommate, respectively.
Korsh has been fascinated by Chervin’s story since first hearing it at a dinner the two had after Korsh signed with the then-ICM agent at the height of Suits‘ success on USA Network in early 2015, after his longtime agent Kim had switched to management.
Kim had helped Korsh sell Suits, which, ironically, was inspired by Entourage. Like Chervin, Korsh had changed careers and worked as an investment banker before pursuing writing. Reflecting on his experience, he decided to write an Entourage-style comedy set on Wall Street with a character modeled after his boss.
Korsh’s spec script ended up being hourlong, and, while it drew interest from USA, the network brass didn’t feel the world of finance would have a wide appeal and asked for the setting to be changed to a law firm. Korsh obliged, and Suits was born.
As the legal drama ended after nine seasons, Korsh set out to write another spec inspired by real-life experiences and people he knows, and, still taken by Chervin’s story, he wrote Ted, which centered on a man named Ted who followed Chervin’s career trajectory of a former New York prosecutor coming to Hollywood to work as an agent. (In the fictionalized version, the prosecutor is trying to escape from the mob when he moves to LA.)
USA brass felt the idea was too showbiz-focused and passed. The script, whose title was changed to Hindsight, was set up at eOne Entertainment — then owned by Hasbro — under President of Global TV Michael Lombardo where Korsh also signed an overall deal. I hear there was an effort by the studio to steer the premise away from its dark, highly serialized nature and showbiz angle closer to the lighter, procedural style that made Suits so successful but it did not go far enough and the project did not sell.
The script then found its way to NBCUniversal where, in another ironic twist, Alex Sepiol, the USA executive who oversaw the development of Suits and is now a senior scripted executive across NBCU’s linear networks and Peacock, had feedback for Korsh that felt like déjà vu: executives liked the characters but felt the Hollywood representation business was too narrow and asked him whether he would consider turning the talent agency into a law firm.
For a second time, Korsh obliged but, after sitting at NBC for a year and a half, the reworked script ultimately got a pass and reverted back to him.
Following the unexpected, massive success of Suits on Netflix last summer, NBCUniversal approached Korsh about doing a new series. I hear the company’s President of Scripted Content Lisa Katz read the Hindsight script, liked it and asked whether they could use the Suits moniker in the title. Korsh was not interested in revisiting the original series and its characters, sources said, but he was open to building a Suits universe in the mold of Yellowstone with new stories and new characters.
NBCU was on board with that and Hindsight, ultimately renamed Suits: L.A., received a pilot order, casting Amell as the lead character Ted Black who at that point, following the project’s complex evolution, was only loosely based on Chervin.
“For the last several years, the guy that created Suits had a spinoff show that he was trying to sell everywhere in town,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said last December. “Everybody passed, including us, and including [NBCUniversal], and now they’re making it.”
Last month, Suits: L.A. was picked up to series. Chervin, who has been repeatedly urged to turn his story into a book or a script, has no involvement or financial participation in the project, though his agency CAA represents David Bartis and Doug Liman’s Hypnotic, producer of both Suits and Suits: L.A., which has been involved in the offshoot since its early stages.
Chernin also does not represent Korsh anymore. After the bruising 2019-20 standoff between the WGA and the major talent agencies over packaging, Chervin only re-signed a handful of his longtime TV writer-director clients, including Scrubs creator and Ted Lasso co-creator Lawrence, as he shifted his focus to sports as ICM Stellar Sports chairman.
But Chervin and Korsh have remained friendly and when the news of the series pickup broke, Chervin texted his former client and Kim with “Congrats on the series pickup form the real Ted,” followed by a smiley-face emoji, to which Korsh responded with “The OG Ted,” and Kim called him a “legend.”