CLICKS
(3.5 out of 5)
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SUIT UP follows renowned crisis manager Jim Dunnigan, who takes the helm of a scandal-soaked athletic department at Glory University. He soon finds himself tasked with rescuing the school’s pristine image, while managing scheming boosters, dysfunctional recruits and a meddling lawyer who won’t go away. With a multi-million-dollar television contract at stake, not to mention his career, Jim must find a way to save the school. Watch Suit Up on Crackle here…
“a college sports-themed, whiter Scandal. Without any believable scandal. ” Read Samara’s full review…
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” fantastic and top notch for a web series – a real must-see… funny ” Read David’s full review…
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“Despite wonderful lead performances by Marc Evan Jackson and Barry Corbin, “Suit Up” is most compelling not as comedy or drama, but as an experiment in a new form of filmmaking.” Read Abdi’s full review…
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SUIT UP – JACQUI REGO – 4.5 Clicks
In the 1950’s, the newfangled era of television brought soap operas into the home, imagined originally to quite literally sell soap to the housewives of America. Sponsorship has a long history in TV, radio, and even Shakespeare knew what side his bread was buttered on.
So for me to take fault with the inter-weaving of Direct TV’s corporate sponsorship of Suit Up, and its subtle reoccurring thesis in the first two seasons (mainly Direct TV = personable small business which is good and big cable = faceless bureaucracy which is bad), then I’d also have to take fault with the political spin Billy Shakespeare wrote into a play called, Richard III. I’m not.
The money has to come from somewhere and frankly, Suit Up is the perfect compelling comedy centering on an unapologetically irreverent crisis manager and a Southern college sports program that’s fallen from grace. As a web series turned digital feature, it’s also at the forefront of a new entertainment medium as significant as the original golden age of television.
This is a show that knows exactly what it is by embracing its corporate roots and re-imagining itself as tightly-written underdog populism – colorful, irreverent, driven, specific, and smart. Suit Up is a comedy that is actually funny, and chances are your little bro, quirky aunt, and best friend will think so too. Read more reviews by Jacqui…
Suit Up- SAMARA BAY – 2.5 Clicks
Suit Up is a college sports-themed, whiter Scandal. Without any believable scandal. The fixer at the heart of the series is a middle-aged white guy played by a fantastic actor who seems nonetheless stuck in a leading role he’s not suited to (har har), in a project that’s masquerading as something new but actually feels chock-full of cliches. Fox is rolling out “digital features” like Suit Up, broken down into episodes, and the ingenuity of that concept is fine. Making a movie that can be watched in installments is fine. It’s actually kind of neat. It feels like watching a whole new genre.
But the content has to be fresh, too. And Suit Up instead features college football guys who are either meat-heads or religiously-inclined cheeseballs, a sexy 20’s female lawyer engaging in a (shock!) competitive yet brazenly flirtatious relationship with our lead gentleman twice her age, and a bunch of old white guys rounding out the cast.
And the problem runs deeper: we’re led to believe this fixer is as good at what he does as Olivia Pope is, but beyond the first scene of the film/series – where we meet him brokering a ballsy solution to a company’s financial meltdown – the filmmakers seem more interested in telling a fish-out-of-water story than a superhero one, so our fixer flounders in this new, college football context as we watch from the sidelines, wondering why exactly he’s still there. It can’t be long before we wonder why we are. Read more reviews by Samara…
Suit Up – DAVID KATSMAN – 4.0 Clicks
Rather than discussing the merits of SUIT UP (which is fantastic and top notch for a web series – a real must-see funny digital series that could be a cable ½-hr comedy in the vein of THE LEAGUE and IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY if it had the budget to pay for a larger writers room), I’d first like to examine the digital series/feature trend amongst major Hollywood Studios. Seeing the incredible reach of viral videos and how they’ve been able to propel the most obscure of acts into total stardom, studios have long been trying to figure out how to monetize this phenomenon. The sticking point has long been the cost of production vs. potential revenues. How do you justify spending millions of dollars on content that is absolutely free to watch and generates little revenue streams?
If you try to slash budgets to justify this kind of distribution, how do you attract quality talent, writers and directors to the project? Audiences have grown to expect high quality product from Hollywood Studios and so naturally have higher expectations than watching an obscure series from someone in the middle of nowhere America. As no one has discovered a tried and true formula, the Studios, thus far, have mostly been playing it by ear.
It seems like the approach studios have recently settled on is trying to create enough buzz around a digital property so as to justify a theatrical or TV launch. Paramount Insurge’s BURNING LOVE is a prime example of this. Having grown immensely popular online, Paramount sold TV distribution rights to E! They are now trying to recreate their success on a bigger budget scale with the Bandito Brothers’ CHOP SHOP.
However, “bigger budget” is a relative term. Per the SAG-AFTRA New Media contract, actors must merely be paid the legal minimum wage in the Stage where they are shooting a digital series/feature. Production companies are allowed to contract out of forced calls, overtime, turnaround times and meal penalties. There has always been a dearth of underrepresented or undiscovered quality acting talent willing to work for such a reduced payday in the hopes of breaking out.
SUIT UP’s lead actor, Marc Evan Jackson, can arguably be called “the poor man’s Clark Gregg.” Not to take anything away from Marc’s commendable performance and his previous body of work, but the resemblance is uncanny and it’s clear which everyman-type actor the producers had in mind when casting Marc. As more digital series experience the success of BURNING LOVE (Ken Marino’s career has really taken off since then), major Studio digital series will be able to attract stronger talent and audiences will truly benefit. Let’s just hope talent representatives recognize this fact and make sure their clients benefit as well. Read more reviews by David..
Suit Up – ABDI NAZEMIAN – 2.5 Clicks
On November 21, Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton announced “a significant shift in emphasis from motion pictures to higher margin television,” shooting a dagger into the hearts of cinephiles everywhere. In related news, Crackle, a subsidiary of Sony Pictures Entertainment, has been bundling web series episodes together and releasing them as digital features. This begs the question: what exactly is a movie? Once upon a time, the difference between film and television was the screen one watched it on, but VOD has changed all that. Certainly, length is a factor, but there have been two-hour episodes of television shows that no one considers cinema. And for all of you readers who find the idea of stringing episodes of a series together and calling it a movie immediately laughable, just imagine how much better the Sex and the City movie would have been had they strung together any four episodes of the brilliant television show.
One of Crackle’s web series/digital features is Suit Up, the story of a crisis manager who takes on the “Pig for Play” scandal a college football team is embroiled in when their quarterback accepts pigs as a gift from a hip-hop impresario. “Suit Up” mines rich and complex territory: the big business of college football. Unfortunately, it never really takes off, lacking the heart and dynamism of a show like Friday Night Lights, which vividly brought to life the world of high school football.
Despite wonderful lead performances by Marc Evan Jackson and Barry Corbin, “Suit Up” is most compelling not as comedy or drama, but as an experiment in a new form of filmmaking. The fact that Suit Up doesn’t entirely succeed stems largely from its not knowing what exactly it is. It exists in an odd purgatory: not scrappy and indie enough to feel like a great web series, not polished and contained enough to feel like a great film. Still, the show has its funny moments, and it has its fans as well. Tellingly, even its fans seem confused about what it is. On Crackle’s site, one fan writes, “Love this series!!!!” while another comments, “Great Movie!” Read more reviews by Abdi…
The Tangled Web We Watch 