• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 3 hours ago

A new music-competition show from America’s heartland may be the best reality talent contest since “American Idol” ushered in the modern era of such shows in 2002.

The show is called “The Road,” and it has 12 hopefuls seeking country-music fame as they go on the road with country star Keith Urban.

Premiering Sunday night with a 90-minute episode on CBS (actual running time 66 minutes), “The Road” has each of the contestants performing as opening acts before Urban takes the stage for the main event.

In their heartfelt performances, the contestants will try to wow their audiences in order to earn their votes to continue in the competition.

The eventual winner receives prizes that can truly be categorized as “grand” -- $250,000 in cash, a recording contract (with Country Road Records), a performance slot at the Stage Coach Country Music Festival in Indio, California, next year and a prize “package” sponsored by Red Bull that includes use of a recording facility in Los Angeles called Red Bull Studio.

There is a lot at stake for these performers. They are not amateurs, but country singer-songwriters who have worked in relative obscurity -- some for many years -- as opening acts for others or performing solo in countless small- and medium-sized venues.

They come from places that are nowhere near New York, Los Angeles or any other major city (except for one contestant from Nashville). Some of their hometowns are mere dots on a map.

They come from Emory and Winchester, Texas; Tahlequah and Adair, Oklahoma; Wake Forest and Marion, North Carolina; Anthem, Arizona; Lafayette, Georgia; Jefferson City, Missouri; Canby, Oregon; and Lake City, Florida.

Urban, 57 -- the veteran country music star born in New Zealand and raised in Australia -- is the star of “The Road,” but he is not a judge. That role belongs to members of the audience.

He is on the show to provide commentary and guide the performers, along with country stars Blake Shelton and Gretchen Wilson, who is introduced on the show as “legendary redneck woman,” taken from the title of her first hit, “Redneck Woman.” The executive producer of “The Road” is Taylor Sheridan.

“The Road” was filmed before the news broke last month that Urban is getting divorced from Nicole Kidman after 19 years of marriage, so the subject never comes up.

But at the beginning of Episode One of “The Road,” Urban talks about the loneliness of touring.  

“When you wake up on a tour bus at 3:30 in the morning and you’re sick as a dog, you’re in the middle of nowhere and you’ve got to play your fifth show later that night, and you haven’t slept, and you miss your friends, and you’re missing your family, and you’re completely lonely and miserable and sick … you say to yourself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ The only answer can be: Because this is what I’m born to do,” he says.

As for the show’s hopeful contestants, their differences lie in the relative strength of their voices, their stage presence and showmanship, and the quality of their songs, all of which they are required to have written themselves (no covers on this music-competition show).

Unlike so many other competition shows, “The Road” is good-natured, with no sign that any of the competitors will emerge as the kind of villain that has become an overused cliché in so many other reality-competition shows.

“The Road” is just too good-hearted for that. May the best twang win.

“The Road” premieres Sunday night (October 19) at 9 Eastern on CBS.