PASADENA, Calif. – The runaway cons from Prison Break and two of their pursuers hoped to escape the North Texas heat with this little excursion to promote Fox's ultimate escapist fare.

Instead they traded a 95-degree high in Dallas on Monday for a sweltering 101 degrees here. Sometimes there's just no justice, but at least the actors could lounge by a hotel pool for much of the day before their midafternoon session with TV critics.

Rockmond Dunbar, who plays fugitive Benjamin "C-Note" Franklin, said he's always happiest where he is. The show's first season, spent largely in an abandoned prison in Joliet, Ill., forced the actors to battle both claustrophobia and frigid temperatures last winter. A Dallas summer is no bargain either, but "you have to love it," he said. "If you don't love it, it's going to be miserable. ... It's a different series because we're not in prison anymore. We're running around. We're sweating. We're protecting ourselves from chiggers and tics. We weren't doing that in Chicago."

Dominic Purcell's character, Lincoln Burrows, spent most of the season on death row after being framed for the murder of the vice president's brother. It made him itchy, but not from battling bugs.

"I got bored as an actor towards the end there," he said. "There's only so many times you can walk around in a cell."

Prison Break will launch its second season on Aug. 21, with six episodes scheduled to air before the show temporarily gives way to Fox's coverage of Major League Baseball's playoffs and World Series. A brief preview of coming attractions included a freight-train sequence shot last month in Rockwall. New cast addition William Fichtner, who's playing dogged FBI agent Alexander Mahone, also has an early scene in which he's told, "It's not like these guys left a map where they're going."

"Actually," Mahone says, "that's exactly what they did."

Mr. Fichtner also played an authority figure in last season's Invasion , which ABC didn't renew. He then made a split-second decision to join Prison Break, which delayed the start of production for a day while awaiting his commitment.

"They promised me there were going to be aliens on the show, and every fourth episode there'd be something orange in the water," Mr. Fichtner joked. "It hasn't happened yet, but I believe it will."

Heartthrob Wentworth Miller's character, Michael Scofield, masterminded the escape of his brother Lincoln and other assorted cons. He sometimes still feels like an alien in a body tattoo that intricately replicates the prison's blueprints.

"I have to admit I'm much less a fan of the tattoo than I was when we started," Mr. Miller said. "It is an arduous process, but it's such a cool special effect. I think it's the most ambitious faux tattoo ever attempted for TV or film. It's the reason why some people are tuning in. ... So it would be a shame to see it go away now that the brothers are on the other side of the wall. For that reason alone, I'm willing to sit in the [makeup] chair for a few more hours."

Season two will encompass just three weeks in the lives of the escapees and those who badly want them behind bars. Wade Williams, who plays revenge-thirsty prison guard Brad Bellick, figures that time's on his side.

"If you look at the history of prison escapes, the prisoners are usually caught within the first two episodes," he said. "So Bellick's got his shotgun cocked and he's going to do some [butt] kicking."

At least that's what he thinks. Co-executive producer Paul T. Scheuring thinks not.

"We will not see a rehash of season one where these guys all end up back in prison in episode three, and they go, 'Now we've got to think of another way out of here.' Season two is a complete reinvention. So the prison really starts to fade away and the places they try to get to for their ultimate escape come to the fore."

Along the way, some of the prisoners are likely to meet or re-meet a woman or two.

"We'll take our estrogen where we can get it," Mr. Miller said.

Whatever direction the series takes, it won't be called Prison Break: Manhunt. Tentative plans to use an elongated title have been dropped, said show publicist Todd Adair.

Mr. Scheuring said he's never liked Prison Break as a title either, because "it sounds like something a third-grader might come up with."

But he's no longer fighting that fight, and is happy to see the show bust out.

"Now that our guys are emancipated, we're opening up our palate," Mr. Scheuring said. "This is not an insular, visually claustrophobic show where everything's done on 'green screen.' We're going to see a lot of helicopter shots [during the planned 10-month shoot in North Texas]. We're going to see the fields and the roads and all different parts of America. So in a lot of ways, we feel like our visual scope is opening up."

Just one more thing. The escaped prisoners' very visible exhalations in the Chicago's area's wintry cold can't be replicated in Dallas' summer sizzle. Mr. Scheuring can live with that.

"It's TV, man!" he said. "It's TV."

E-mail ebark@dallasnews.com