Entertainment

TV: Fox series to film second season in Dallas

11:33 AM CDT on Monday, May 15, 2006

By ED BARK / The Dallas Morning News

North Texas suddenly is a hotbed for network television production, with Fox set to announce today that the entire second season of its Prison Break series will be filmed in the Dallas area.

Prison Break producer Garry Brown confirms that the show soon will open a production office in downtown Dallas, with filming scheduled to begin on June 15.

The new season will have its inmates on the lam after they busted out of jail last Monday. Various area locations, as well as the city itself, initially will be cast as "Anywhere USA" as part of Prison Break's evolving "road show," he says.

"It's a big deal to land it, especially since it's already such a hot show," says Dallas Film Commission director Janis Burklund. "It's a huge surprise. All of a sudden we've got so much coming up, it's insane. Which is a good problem to have."

She estimates that the nine- to 10-month Prison Break shoot will be "as big or bigger" than Walker, Texas Ranger, which pumped an estimated $54 million into the area economy in its last season (2000-01) on CBS.

Mr. Brown, who worked for six seasons on Walker and has a home in Dallas, says Prison Break scouted locations in Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana and Florida before choosing the Dallas area over Austin.

Prison Break, which had two Golden Globe nominations and won a People's Choice Award as favorite new drama series, essentially will become a latter-day version of The Fugitive when the second season kicks off in the fall or late summer.

Its featured inmates, led by brothers Michael Scofield (frequent magazine cover boy Wentworth Miller) and Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell), escaped last week from the fictional Fox River State Penitentiary. Michael had himself incarcerated in the show's first episode as a means of springing Lincoln, who had been framed for murder.

"My experiences in the Dallas area really led us all to believe that what our story calls for next season could be obtained very efficiently here," Mr. Brown says. "It just made sense. You can pretty much, within a 30-mile radius, find a multitude of looks and about 10 to 12 towns, not to mention the city of Dallas."

The show's season one finale, slotted at 7 tonight on KDFW-TV (Channel 4) locally, will be delayed about 20 minutes by a presidential address on immigration reform that is scheduled for the same hour.

Prison Break's actors are accustomed to working on location. This season's 22 episodes were filmed in the Chicago area, with an abandoned prison in nearby Joliet anchoring the action. But finding suitable get-out-of-jail venues for a second season "just became too big a logistical challenge for us," Mr. Brown says.

"We found we had to go anywhere from an hour to two hours outside of Chicago to find locations that were rural enough," she says.

The Film Commission's Ms. Burklund, who's still trying to lure a planned Dallas feature film to the city, is happy to be juggling a wealth of new business that materialized in recent weeks.

The pilot for 12 Miles of Bad Road, a possible HBO comedy series about a wealthy Dallas matriarchy, will be filmed at least partly in the city this summer. A House Divided, a potential ABC series starring Dylan McDermott of The Practice, recently completed production on its first episode in Dallas. The show could return to the city full time if it makes the network's fall lineup, to be announced Tuesday.

Dallas also has landed Inspector Mom, a series of whodunits being made for cable's Lifetime Movie Network by local production company Fireside Entertainment.

Ms. Burklund says she also is increasingly confident that the announced big-screen version of Dallas, starring John Travolta as J.R. Ewing, will be a significant presence in the city later this year.

The film's recently named new director, Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham), likely will be visiting Dallas within the next few weeks, Ms. Burklund says.

"I'm pretty sure we're going to end up getting more of the movie than we initially thought we would," she says. "And that's without any help from the state, which is very disappointing."

Rival states such as Louisiana and Florida have been luring movie and TV productions with major taxpayer-funded incentives. But North Texas so far has managed to stay competitive without any financial aid from state or local government.

"We've had to scrape and claw to get these things," Ms. Burklund says of Prison Break and other recent breakthroughs. "If we had incentives, we'd probably be flooded."

E-mail ebark@dallasnews.com