’12 Miles of Bad Road’ Shelved Without Airing a Single Scene

FORT WORTH, Texas – For all the blather about luring the bright lights of Hollywood film and TV productions to North Texas, few make use of the place for its own identity. Instead, the region is usually just a stand-in for standard-issue urban or suburban America. It’s Vancouver on the prairie.

"Prison Break?" Gimme a break. Never were the fleeing felons supposed to actually "be" in North Texas when the show shot its second and third seasons here. As far as the viewers were concerned, they might as well have still been in Illinois, where the first season was filmed. Even "Dallas." for all of its iconic glory, didn’t dig much into the minutiae of life in this region, from street names to burger stands.

That makes HBO’s decision to shelve the new series "12 Miles of Bad Road" without airing a single scene all the more disappointing. The "dramedy" stars Lily Tomlin as the acerbic grand-dame of a comically dysfunctional Park Cities/Preston Hollow real-estate family. Six episodes of the show, which is produced by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason ("Designing Women"), were completed before the writers’ strike halted production and the cable network landed the death blow.

Granted, judging by the six episodes, which were sent to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for preview, "Bad Road" is wildly uneven and crammed with a crowd of characters that makes gridlock on I-35 look like the Indy 500. But there are enough saving graces to make the series, which the Thomasons are trying to shop to another network, an often savagely hilarious take on the family drama.

Tomlin plays world-weary Amelia Shakespeare with an imperious nonchalance, though it’s Mary Kay Place as her sister, C.Z., who is the real star. Her personification of the twangy Texas woman stereotype _ one who can lecture a roomful of Dallas debs on decorum one minute, then chow down on a Keller’s Drive-In burger the next _ is smartly impressive. Similarly, Gary Cole as the obnoxiously philandering son Jerry and, especially, Leslie Jordan as the charmingly effete Kenny Kingman _ sort of the Truman Capote of Turtle Creek _ turn in memorable performances.

If "12 Miles of Bad Road" ever does make it to air, no doubt some on the eastern side of the Metroplex won’t be too pleased. The show traffics in the Big D of Hollywood’s fractured imagination _ big hair, big cars, big egos _ and makes no concession to the realities that Dallas is now a majority-minority city or that the entire region is becoming increasingly diverse. ("Bad Road’s" only African-Americans are either Dallas Cowboys or maids, the only Hispanic is a naive exchange student treated like a houseboy, and Asians are invisible.)

Still, within its myopic universe (Fort Worth is mentioned only briefly in the series) and as a comedic study of one family’s divorce from everyday realities, "12 Miles of Bad Road" is, at its best, wickedly good fun. It’s certainly better than most of what HBO is shoveling up these days, like the pretentious and unpalatable "Tell Me You Love Me" and "In Treatment."

Too bad that few may ever get the chance to see it.