10) Graceland
It used to be that summer meant an endless supply of reruns. Well, those days have come and gone. Now, loyal television viewers can expect an onslaught of summer series to keep them entertained, and among those is USA’s Graceland.
For all the obvious drama, on a deeper level, this series brings viewers a look at the camaraderie that exists between a group of federal agents who double as housemates living in a repurposed mansion in Malibu. Graceland is, above all else, a fun take on inter-agency undercover ops.
The dynamics in season two shifted dramatically as the main protagonist, Mike Warren (Aaron Tveit) returned to the beach for round two, going from newbie to shot caller. His mission was to take down a drug cartel he’d been tracking from his cushy government perch in D.C., and he pulled all the other agents from their respective investigations to help, which got things off to a rocky start.
Unlike other police procedurals, Graceland concerns itself very little with solving cases on an episode-by-episode basis. Instead, the show takes on a season long investigation with several caveats that pull it in alternate directions.
This season, Briggs (Daniel Sunjata) and his unsavory, but accepted, methods took a backseat to his relationship with Charlie (Vanessa Ferlito), and fell even further under the radar as other plot points took center stage. Things ended with an extraordinary cliffhanger, too, with Briggs rushing in to save Mike from being smothered to death in his hospital bed – leaving things very much up in the air for season three.
