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Graceland airs Tuesdays at 9pm on Jack City, Channel 31 on free TV, 27 on Sky, 60 on Destiny, 40 on Cable Link, and 22 on Cignal. Watching the box is so complicated.

When we first heard the title we thought it was a biopic of Elvis in his final years, or a reality show about Elvis impersonators (For authenticity, some of them would have to be Pinoy), or a mystery built on the many Elvis Lives conspiracy theories. In fact Graceland refers to a beachfront house in Southern California that was confiscated from Elvis Presley-loving drug lords. That nice house is now occupied by good-looking undercover agents from the FBI, the DEA, and Customs. In short, it is Melrose Place with guns.

In the last decade, storytelling on TV (mostly cable) has gotten so ambitious that the medium, once the less glamorous cousin of movies, has redefined itself as the movies’ most serious competitor. Free of the constraints of the two-hour format and the need to recoup all costs on opening weekend, TV has been doing what most movies can only hope to do. Can we ever know a movie character as thoroughly as we know Tony Soprano, the monster we loved because we recognized ourselves in him? Would Walter White’s evolution from meek, downtrodden high school chemistry teacher to the drug lord Heisenberg be as terrifying if it unfolded in two hours?

Are people outside of a Shakespeare adaptation even allowed to speak like the characters in Deadwood? Would the Red Wedding have slaughtered the audience so thoroughly if it had been in the middle of a movie trilogy? The carnage took under ten minutes, but the emotional impact took three years to build.

The best TV shows have dropped the hand-holding and the fillers; the audience is plunged right into the story. In the pilot of The Sopranos, we see Tony having an anxiety attack even before we know (though we suspect) his line of work; Breaking Bad opens with Walter running out of a smoking RV in his underwear.

In the first episode of Graceland the characters are introduced to each other (As in, “A, this is B, B, this is A”)…and then they go surfing. (If we wanted to see Baywatch again, we’d look for the old Baywatch Hawaii with Jason Momoa.) And then, before anything’s happened, the episode’s over. It’s the old model of network TV, for people who want something to look at while they’re digesting their dinner. It’ll probably get better—we haven’t even met the bad guys yet. (We wanted to see Pedro Pascal before he turns up in Westeros.) We’ve gotten so used to TV shows in which the protagonist is both good guy and bad guy that when we see the fresh-faced FBI agent and his “maverick” training officer, we wonder who gets to kill whom.

All that stuff about undercover agents and drug lords reminded us of Miami Vice. So we dug up our ancient DVD of the show that caused guys to wear pastel-colored T-shirts with unconstructed white suits and espadrilles. (They were doing that till the early 90s, prompting our friend’s boss to tell one fashion victim: “You don’t understand. Don Johnson is cute.”) We knew that Miami Vice was influential and that its producer Michael Mann has become a brilliant film director. But we hadn’t realized just how influential the show was. The look of 80s yuppie excess, the use of music, morally ambiguous characters, the cynicism towards the powers that be (the CIA protecting arms dealers), the political issues and the endings that didn’t tie everything up neatly or were downright bummers—it told stories in a new way, and other shows followed.

We ended up watching several episodes, and had fun spotting guest stars who went on to bigger things (Bruce Willis, Joan Chen, and we’d forgotten that Crockett’s original partner was Jimmy Smits). Don Johnson (Crockett) was pretty good, Philip Michael Thomas (Tubbs) not—with that acting, his cover would be blown in minutes. The original chief of the Vice squad was the typical sympathetic boss frustrated by his men’s unorthodox ways—he was replaced by Edward James Olmos, who could express an entire range of emotions by glowering.

As a reminder, here is the drum fill that justifies Phil Collins’s existence.