“If somehow Rudy and Rocky had a baby it still wouldn’t be as big an underdog as our little show.” Lone Star creator Kyle Killen takes to the internet to drum up support for his underseen show. Well, it’s working, isn’t it?
In an open letter posted to his blog on Thursday, Killen was surprisingly forthright about Lone Star’s less than stellar premiere on Monday:
“When everyone who watched your show is a paid critic or someone you went to high school with, that’s less of a premiere than a slideshow.”
I was one of the handful who watched it – in real-time, commercials and all – and I dug it. (So did the Chronicle’s TV critic.) It’s an intriguing show about a smooth-talking Texan running a very long con, juggling two lives and two women, one in Dallas and one in Midland. Frankly, it felt more like the first act for a really great movie, and I’m eager to see if the premise is sustainable. (Killen is also a screenwriter, whose super-buzzed-about but so far unreleased debut The Beaver caught a bad break when leading man Mel Gibson got all, well, Mel Gibson-y again.)
Killen’s set to appear at the Austin Film Festival in October. With any luck, he’ll be talking about his show’s startling come-from-behind win, and not the undeserved crash and burn of one of the fall season’s most critically acclaimed shows.
But that’s not going to happen on its own. We’ll let Killen make the pitch:
“[H]ere we are. Still alive. A little groundhog peeking out of a bomb crater to see if there’s six more weeks of nuclear winter or if, perhaps, something can grow in this hole. And that’s where you come in.”
You can read the letter here, and check out the pilot here. Lone Star airs Monday nights on Fox at 8pm.
This article appears in September 17 • 2010.
