Warning: SPOILERS for the Suits LA episode “He Knew” are ahead!
If you’re making a TV show about a law firm in Los Angeles that chiefly represents people in the entertainment industry, that leaves the door open for countless actors to appear as themselves. The Suits LA episode “He Knew,” which aired just a few days ago on the 2025 TV schedule and can be streamed with a Peacock subscription, saw The Office’s Brian Baumgartner chiefly filling that role, but Patton Oswalt also got some time to shine. However, as Oswalt shared while speaking with CinemaBlend, there’s a big difference between his real life self and his Suits LA self, though he also has an idea I like how how the latter could return to the NBC series.
Oswalt came into the picture on Suits LA when Lex Scott Davis’ Erica Collins and Alice Lee’s Leah Power arranged for Baumgartner to meet him. While the two of them initially hit it off, things went sideways when Oswalt told Baumgartner he didn’t have what it took to be an Oscar-winning dramatic actor. It was later revealed that Erica told Oswalt to deliberately rile up Baumgartner up to test his determination to accomplish this goal. In real life though, Oswalt wouldn’t be up for doing this, as he told me when I asked him how he reacted when he was told he’d be tearing into a member of The Office’s cast:
I'm torn because I know the scene will be really fun, but that's not something that I normally do. I'm just not a very confrontational person, so it did feel a little weird. As fun as it was, it did feel weird.
Patton Oswalt got some solid digs in at Brian Baumgartner on Suits LA, like saying that Toby was funnier than Kevin on The Office and shouting “That’s what she said!” as Baumgartner angrily left the room. But if you’re someone who requires this kind of manipulation from Oswalt in the real world, you’re out of luck. He made it abundantly clear to me later in our conversation that this is not part of his repertoire, saying:
I wouldn't have the nerve to pull it off to sit there and be strategically mean to someone. It's not one of my skills.
Ultimately this ploy ended up working out, as Erica Rollins revealed her true intentions to Brian Baumgartner, threw her full support behind him and agreed to help him get dramatic performing work. But what about Patton Oswalt’s Suits LA future? Well, when I asked him what kind of scenarios he envisions that would require him to seek help from Black & Associates, he told me:
The version of myself that's in that show I think is maybe too ambitious for his own good and maybe wants to do that classic ‘I want to work outside my wheelhouse,’ maybe to his own detriment. He’s the classic kind of guy that would use them to get him into a situation that he thinks he wants, and then he has to use them to get him out of that situation. Yeah, I think that's a classic thing he would do.
You know, that sounds an awful lot like why Brian Baumgartner was brought into Suits LA. Only in Patton Oswalt’s case, maybe he’s looking do something outside of the entertainment industry, but his attempt doesn’t go well and he needs the law firm to assist him. Whatever the case, Oswalt sounds like he’s game to return to Suits LA, so if that happens, hopefully the writers will take his idea into consideration.
For now, catch new episodes of Suits LA Sundays at 9 pm ET on NBC. For those of you looking to see more of Patton Oswalt, his last film appearance, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, can be streamed with a Netflix subscription. That’s also how you’ll be able to hear him reprising Matthew the Raven later this year in The Sandman’s second and final season.
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