{alltv} It's hard not to love 'Lone Star' con man

Once again, TV drills deep in the heart of Texas.

Like that outsized, soap-powered hit Dallas, Lone Star plumbs dramatic riches from a Texan landscape of big money, big family and big oil (though, thankfully, we left big hair behind in the '80s.) And chances are, it's also discovered a big star in relative newcomer James Wolk, who may find that Lone Star does for his career what Dallas did for Larry Hagman's .

This is, however, a Dallas for our times, meaning money is harder to come by and sympathies are spread across class lines. Wolk's Bob Allen is a brilliant, baby-faced con man, born poor, now rich. But he wants more than money — he wants to turn the fake tycoon life he's invented into something real, and he wants his entire extended family to benefit.

The problem for dear Bob is that his family is a bit too extended. There's his real-life dad (played in an excellent multi-layered turn by David Keith ), a cynical con artist who expects Bob to stick to the con. There's his Houston clan anchored by his wife (Friday Night Lights' Adrianne Palicki ) and her dad (Jon Voight ), who wants him to take over the family oil business. And there's the new family he's thinking of forming out in hardscrabble west Texas — a group he started out fleecing.

Bob wants it all for all, and it's the poignancy Wolk brings to Bob's self-deluded conviction that he can somehow make everyone happy that makes the character so appealing. But to his credit, Wolk also lets us see why Bob is such a good con man, exposing the desperation under that open, innocent face.

Wolk has a hard balancing act to pull off, but then so does his show. Created by Kyle Killen and produced by Party of Five's Chris Keyser and Amy Lippman, Lone Star throws a lot of balls in the air tonight — and not all of them are of equal weight. Bob's wife and her dad are more interesting than her brothers, and Bob's life in Houston is far more interesting than his life in west Texas, which feels too sweetly artificial.

Still, if Monday's debut leaves problems in its wake, it also does an impressive numbers of things remarkably well. It firmly establishes its intriguing main character's brains, skills, and skewed-but-real moral code. (For instance, there are only so many women he's willing to cheat on.) In one of the hour's best scenes, it shows how much he loves his father and how much that love has cost him. And it makes us want to spend more time with Bob and the young actor who plays him.

For a TV show, that's like striking oil.

Lone Star
Fox. Monday, 9 p.m. ET/PT
* * * 1/2 (out of four)