{alltv} Confidence is high for Fox's con-man drama 'Lone Star'

Bob Allen is messin' with Texans.

Lone Star, a soapy drama that marks Fox's biggest new-series push for fall, centers on Allen (newcomer James Wolk), a confident achiever who exists in parallel worlds as a married-into-wealth husband and father in Houston and a smitten boyfriend in Midland.

The catch? Like his dad (David Keith), he's a con man, and the loves of his life are marks he has simply fallen for.

"He's flawed, he's selfish, clearly, but he's not a snake," says Wolk, a charismatic new face on TV. "All he knows is he's a con; it's the family business he was raised (in). The rub is that if he decides to go straight, he has to leave one of his lovers behind."

But soon enough, he tries, and "let's just say he's not the only one with tricks up his sleeve."

He has insinuated himself into the oil business run by his wary father-in-law, Clint (Jon Voight), sparking jealousy among his wife's brothers. His future fiancée, Lindsay (Eloise Mumford), and wife, Cat (Adrianne Palicki), know nothing of each other.

If it all sounds a little like Dallas, it's been likened to that 1980s soap. But there's less campy froth and more intrigue based on the central plot device. (And unlike Dallas, Lone Star is actually filmed there, a stand-in for the other two Texas cities.)

"I was attracted to the idea of somebody who had a double life," says creator Kyle Killen, who concedes it was a "huge challenge" to make the character sympathetic enough to lead a big-network series. He initially conceived the role with a middle-aged actor in mind and hoped to wait to reveal the con until the first season ended. But Wolk, 25, nailed his audition, and Fox insisted the con be a central theme from the beginning.

"One of the things you have to confront when you say 'I want to be married to two people and I want to go straight' is that all of those objectives aren't actually possible," Killen says. Lone Star is not a typical network series, say executive producers Amy Lippman and Chris Keyser (Party of Five). It feels like "a cable show," Lippman says. "It has a very strong anti-hero, a very complex character," and it toys with viewers' loyalties.

In one scene in the pilot episode, Allen resists the advances of a woman in a hotel lobby. "The idea that as an audience, you were rooting for this guy and thinking he was honorable because he wouldn't cheat on his two wives was so interesting to me," Lippman says.

"There are people who live lives based on central lies for decades," Keyser says. Even folksy CBS newsman Charles Kuralt was revealed to have a secret second family after his death. "Everyone else in the world is naturally gullible; people want to believe we are honest."

Palicki (Friday Night Lights) says Allen is seemingly "honest and earnest," and like another criminal she admires — Showtime's vigilante killer Dexter — "you don't want Bob to get caught."

But the project was a favorite of Fox programming chief Kevin Reilly. Though he concedes it's a tricky show to pull off, "I liked the provocative premise that keeps you on your toes guessing and playing with your rooting interest," he says. "Our biggest asset is that Jimmy Wolk has got the spark. The goal is to really invest in that character and then slowly try to dial up the rest of the ensemble."

Reilly says that while the show has obvious appeal to women, "men should like it (too); it's not all frothy relationship stuff." And Lippman says that soaps, which have acquired a pejorative connotation, now come in many different stripes.

"When we were doing Party of Five, we were looking at shows like thirtysomethingand My So-Called Life as competition," she says. "Now in our writers' room, our references are to very different kinds of shows," including Breaking Bad and Mad Men. "Before, it was a family drama where we needed to create incident. And this is a character that has so much incident in his life that what he's looking to do is find peace in the two worlds."