No, it isn't about Elvis.
Instead, the title of Graceland, USA's latest drama, refers to a shared southern California beach house seized from a drug lord and used as a shared home for DEA, FBI and Customs agents who team up to battle crime. Among the stars are Daniel Sunjata (Rescue Me), who plays hotshot FBI agent Paul Briggs, who mentors newbie Mike Warren (Aaron Tveit, now seen as a student revolutionary in Les Miserables).
The show, due this summer, is a deliberately darker departure from the usually sunny procedurals seen on USA, though it hails from White Collar creator Jeff Eastin and was inspired by a real group of housemates in Manhattan Beach, Calif. (The series shoots in Florida). One "started telling stories" about the experience, "and at that point I was like, 'I gotta make this into a show,' " says Eastin, who has been working on it for years.
Warren is a reluctant transplant, diverted from a planned FBI assignment in Washington, D.C., for initially unknown reasons. And the motivations of Briggs will be "teased out over the course of the season," Sunjata says. "We deal with a house full of people who lie for a living" as they adopt undercover alter-egos. "You get to see in the relationships of the characters who's keeping secrets. Briggs is an incredibly complex character; his dimensions are revealed over time, but he's not what he appears to be at the beginning."
Neither are others: "We're all surprised when we get new scripts (by) the turns the stories are taking," says Tveit, a Broadway veteran. "The things you don't expect to happen, happen."
