Hallmark Texas Watch: Texas Two-Step (2026)

Watched:  06/14/2026

Viewing:  First

Format:  Hallmark Channel

Director:  Eva Tavares

Regional specificity is hard.   

I live in Austin, Texas which has, in the last two decades (and to my surprise), become a real tourist town.  People come here and drink, eat some barbecue and street tacos, feel they've lived authentically Austin/ Texas and go home.  And that's fine. 

It's not just at Christmas that Hallmark likes to make movies about country life's superiority to city life.  We do not require the yuletide season to insist that what you really need to do is give up your nice place in a city and your much-worked-for career track and do... something? in the country.  Not when you can boff the guy from high school who is roughly doing now what he did at age 17.  And, Hallmark -  occasionally - likes to make movies specifically about people doing this in Texas.  

While looking for World Cup Games, I saw Hallmark was debuting their latest "Texas" movie.  And I watched it so you don't have to.

Texas Two-Step (2026) is a movie about a woman who must go home to "Blue Creek" from Austin/Dallas to check in on her aging aunt and her roadhouse country bar and grill. 

It is a Hallmark movie.  No need to get into the plot.  It stars Heather Hemmens, who is generally better than your average Hallmark star.  She is joined by Hallmark Hunk Brendan Penney in tight jeans.

"Why do you say Austin/Dallas?" you ask?  Because in the establishing shot of where Girl lives, they show stock footage of Lady Bird Lake here in Austin, and then cut to the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas roughly four hours away.  You can see Reunion Tower and everything (as seen in "Detroit" in RoboCop.)

My suspicion is that the editor thought the Dallas bridge was the Pennybacker Bridge in Austin, but that bridge is nestled between the hills of West Austin spanning the Colorado River.  

Even Godzilla knows:

he's headed for Casino El Camino

So I was very confused and thought the movie was saying this woman left Austin and drove to Dallas, but, no.  The editor was just bad.

Look, my thesis here is that Hallmark could *easily* hire someone.... anyone... from Texas to just say "no".  Like, bring in a Texan (not one of our recent transplants) to look at the language, look at the sets and art direction, look at your on-screen food, look at your stock footage...  In fact, Hallmark, I will do this for a nominal fee.  

First - everything in the movie is more generic cowboy America that could be literally anywhere in the US at this point.  It lacks any Texas specificity, and for those who move here, our specificity is famously confounding and annoying.  

Yes, generic Country & Western culture has spread everywhere, including cowboy hats, terrible pop country music, and too many trucks.  But Texas is its own thing - neither Southern nor Southwestern.  We have chips in the shape of our state.  We think slapping the word "Texas" on anything automagically improves it.  It is why when you say "if you hate your government, you should move" to Texas lefties, they just blink at you like you just said "you should remove your own leg".

So...  In this movie - Where are the Texas flags?  I kept seeing American flags, which, fair.  But what I didn't see was the Lone Star flag prominently displayed.  Which isn't required, but if you have the US flag, in Texas, it's highly likely you have the other.  And, for that matter, a Lone Star beer sign or a Shiner Bock sign is just as likely in a bar. 

My suspicion is that the roadhouse in the movie is based loosely on someone walking into Austin's Broken Spoke during a visit.  Or getting a loose idea of a Texas dancehall - which would be larger.  Maybe the writer visited Gruene Hall?  

At some point, a character pours some sort of chip *out of a mason jar* and into a chip basket.  And the chips are utterly unidentifiable and I assume some Canadian thing.  Because, friend, in Texas we get our chips from a tortilla chip warmer and serve them up with a shovel.  With a bowl of salsa.  

We eat a lot of stuff that would be easy to get and feel authentic.  Someone did figure out about biscuits and gravy, but we *never* actually see them.  We just mention them.  Tacos?  Breakfast tacos? Migas?  Never seen.  The discussion around barbecue is insulting to a fellow Texan.  But at least the tray of food looks relatively correct even if the actors are clearly not allowed to touch that food and I couldn't see the actual meat.  And the Aunt character does mention kolaches, a real shibboleth of Texas everyday cuisine (and, yes, we know what we eat as a kolache is not the same as those in Europe.  Everyone simmer down.).

The glassware is bizarre, but that's just a Hallmark thing.  But nonetheless all looks incredibly wrong in a state where you goddamn better put a beer in a pint glass or just serve it cold from an ice trough.  We are not drinking beer from a mason jar at a bar.

All of the hats seem like they're felt or beaver instead of straw.  Is this winter?  I need to know.

As the movie was filmed in British Columbia, CA, there are no Hispanic people, which is just utter bullshit.  Texas is 40% Hispanic.  You are not going anywhere and not seeing Hispanic people.  Our lead is Black, which is also part of Texas, certainly (once again my appreciation of Ms. Knowles for reminding the rest of the world of Texas' proud Black Heritage).    

Edit:  Apparently Kayla Zander, who plays the Best Pal character, identifies as Latinx.  We'll take that win.

Realistically, our lead doesn't have much of a Texas accent (which... Texas has different regional accents, so good luck with that, anyway) as she's been in Austin for a while and I assume lost it here.  Tragically, our lead actor also clearly cannot say "y'all" with any conviction, so that's cut completely from the script after the first scene.  

In fact, no one ever says "y'all", which... what are we even doing here if we can't fake a "y'all"?  

The film is called Texas Two-Step and features a scene with a Two-Step lesson in which they do not do the Texas Two-Step.  A dance so complicated, it has two steps (I kid, it's a bit more than that).  

To the film's credit, when they do have to fully dance, they're fine.  Not enough spinning of partners, but fine.  And I'm not sure that was the Two-Step, but as I did not truck with the country lifestyle in my younger days, my time in dancehalls is deeply limited.

True story - they built a Midnight Rodeo dancehall out in a stripmall near my folks' house when I was in college.  At my mom's behest, one afternoon we went there to play pool, and some lady decided my *mom* was a problem, and tried to start a fight with her.  Which... if y'all only knew The KareBear, you'd know: oh, right, there are no shortage of dumb, redneck reactionaries on the fringes of Houston and there's a reason The League skeedaddled just as fast as he could and continued avoiding dumbshit kickers ever since.  Ie:  I do not miss the Spring/ Klein area.

Somehow Hallmark always skips over the "drunk, violent, rednecks also live in these places" part of their idylls of country life.

The name of the place is also very not Texas.  "Blue Creek" sounds like it would be a bullshit development outside of Cypress-Fairbanks in Houston.  You want to give it a Texas name, it's either butchering some Spanish words or it's something goofy like "Flatbutte".  There's kind of no inbetween.

I know Blue Creek is an imaginary town, but as they keep saying Austin is "the big city" where Girl has forgotten how to dance? (I assure you, you are allowed to scoot your boot here) - it would make sense if we knew how far this hole of a town is from Austin.  Did she go to West Texas?  The Panhandle?  Crosstimbers?  East Texas?  It takes 16 hours to cross Texas - so I need some specifics!

They also set up the tavern in question as somewhere everyone knows... and there's a few of those.  I think there's one also in Luckenbach or Shiner, Texas.  But I don't pay that much attention.  I was more of a Liberty Lunch guy back in the day.  But generally those places don't rely on a house band - they're venues where stars want to play.  Example:  Kacey Musgraves just sold out three nights at Gruene Hall.  

What did they get right?  I mean - I've tried to throw them some bones.  It's all stuff you'll see on Threads as people debate regional food.  But it really feels like someone spent three days here and just ate their way around town when they wrote the script.  But that didn't make it's way to the actual production.  

It's nice they wanted to highlight my home state.  But it is also a bit depressing that they can't be bothered to ask standard questions (ask me about the one where they were supposedly making Texas BBQ on what looked like a Weber Grill).  

These things are pretty easy to fake.  And it would just take someone a few Zoom calls.  

Anyway, Hallmark, my contact info is on the blog.  Ring me up.