Few people will argue that Netflix’s House Of Cards is the best show in the world, but it’s certainly a big hit. Maybe we all just love seeing a famous actor playing a fictional president? That’s what Epix is probably hoping, since that’s the framework it’s using for Graves, one of the streaming service’s first two original scripted shows to move past the pilot stage. Graves is apparently a comedy, and Variety says it will star Nick Nolte as a former U.S. President “who is determined to right the wrongs of his administration, 20 years after he left office.” That doesn’t sound much like a comedy to us, but maybe that’s because we’re used to the actual American political system, in which nothing is ever funny.
Epix’s other original scripted series is Berlin Station, an espionage thriller about a CIA agent operating in Germany who is tasked with finding “the source of a leak who provided information to a now-famous whistleblower.” It sounds a little bit like a non-union German-equivalent of a show about hunting down Edward Snowden, and it’s being written by spy novelist Olen Steinhauer.
Epix, of course, is the video streaming service that isn’t Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Crackle, or (as of this week) Spotify. It’s probably best known for having a handful of movies that the other guys have, but the other guys won’t have Graves or Berlin Station. Take that, Netflix!