In the new comedic mystery series The Lowdown, Ethan Hawke plays writer Lee Raybon, who runs a Tulsa used bookstore by day, but cares more about his sideline as a “truthstorian” — a pretentiously on-brand way of telling people that he’s a reporter. Lee is a dogged investigator who has, with virtually no resources outside of a beat-up old panel van with a tape deck, uncovered lots of secrets the rich and powerful of Oklahoma would prefer to keep hidden. But the most impressive thing about him may be his gift for talking his way both into and out of trouble.
Near the start of the series, Lee’s approached by Marty (Keith David), a private investigator who knows a lot about Lee’s chief subject, gubernatorial candidate Donald Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan). Marty is an erudite man of letters who has long wanted to meet one of his favorite writers. Within an episode and a half, the mere sight of Lee sets Marty’s teeth grinding, as he complains, “Don’t meet your heroes.” Later, Lee inadvertently stumbles upon an illegal fishing operation, and the criminals seem eager to kill him as much for how annoying they find him as for the danger he poses to their business. In the end, Lee saves himself by dazzling them with the story of the first time he ever did meth. By the time he’s done spinning this yarn, they treat him like an old and dear friend, and you can understand why.
The Lowdown comes from writer-director Sterlin Harjo, creator of the Indigenous-teen comedy Reservation Dogs — a.k.a. one of the very best television shows of the last decade — and is a reunion with Hawke, who appeared in the penultimate Rez Dogs episode. The two men clearly hit it off. Harjo understands better than all but a few of his star’s previous collaborators how to weaponize Hawke’s gift for playing talkative dirtbags who are equal parts insufferable and charming. Lee is a character you may often want to punch in the mouth. But his heart is usually in the right place. And he’s really good with putting words in the exact right order to get people to go along with his latest insane idea.
Most importantly, Lee in fact does get punched in the mouth, and other places, early and often, because the series keenly understands how exasperating its hero is much of the time. It anticipates how the audience will respond to him, and gets right out in front of that reaction to agree that, yes, he’s a lot. And that in turn makes The Lowdown even more charming than Lee at his best, and without any of the negative qualities that come part and parcel with his whole carefully curated persona as the last honest man in Tulsa. It’s an enormously appealing show, full of big humor, vivid characters, and an engaging mystery, and it has a complete command of its voice from minute one. It borrows the elastic, ingratiating tone not only of Reservation Dogs, but of other past quirky gems like Terriers and Lodge 49, and on top of that adds a healthy splash of Big Lebowski-style ludicrousness. My only objection to anything about the show is that FX didn’t give critics the whole season in advance, so I have to wait to enjoy the last few episodes.
Our story begins with the apparent suicide of Donald’s brother Dale (Tim Blake Nelson) in the wake of an expose Lee wrote about the Washbergs for a local publication. Where others are chastened by this man’s death, Lee takes it as a sign that he’s onto something and has to keep digging. When his editor encourages him to ease up a little, Lee compares his pursuit of the family to FDR learning about Adolph Hitler. He’s a megalomaniac, and a pretentious, pedantic one at that; while being tortured by a pair of neo-Nazis who are upset he published a story about their racist activity in a newspaper, he replies, “It’s a long-form magazine! It’s not a newspaper!”
Some of this is a put-on, as we see when he gets tossed out of Dale’s memorial service and begins ranting about the moneylenders being thrown out of the temple in Jerusalem. But a lot of it is that he just can’t help himself. The one purely good thing he has produced for this world is his daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who’s largely being raised by his ex-wife Samantha (Kaniehtiio Horn, who played the mythical Deer Lady on Rez Dogs). And though Francis worships her dad and enjoys helping him chase down stories, she’s also not blind to the effect he has on people. When Lee insists that everyone is mad at him because the world hates writers, she tells him, “They don’t hate writers. They just hate you.”
Everyone Lee comes into contact with is at minimum annoyed with him most of the time, if not outright hating him. But he also adds spice to their lives. Dan (Macon Blair) runs his legal practice next to Lee’s bookstore, and frequently makes his office safe available to his neighbor, while also complaining, “I don’t like hiding things that come out of your pants.” Powerful real estate developer Frank (Tracy Letts) looks at Lee like a pesky bug that keeps flitting about, yet he’s also amused by his antics. Peter Dinklage turns up for a wonderful episode as Lee’s old frenemy Wendell, and when Wendell hears a summary of what’s been happening lately, he quips, “Oh, you live in a bad crime novel now?”
Keith David as Marty
Shane Brown/FX
The Lowdown very much feels like a good crime novel. The hardboiled works of Jim Thompson are a recurring plot point, but Harjo and company are operating more like they’re in Elmore Leonard or Donald E. Westlake country, mixing self-aware humor(*) with genuine intrigue and menace, along with a scuzzy atmosphere and a rich, detailed sense of place. Lee is a man out of time, full of retro affectations (plus an ironic Confederate flag tattoo that comes in handy whenever he has to pose as a kindred spirit to a racist), in a show that’s set in the present day but has a deep affection for offbeat Seventies crime movies.
(*) The casting of Tracy Letts — in his second journalism-oriented show this month, after his recurring role on The Paper — puts him a short drive away from the setting of his Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County. There are a lot of subtle winks like that in the series, including someone other than Kyle MacLachlan playing a character named Agent Cooper, and even a reference to Hawke’s hilarious, thunderously great performance as John Brown in The Good Lord Bird.
It’s an Ethan Hawke star vehicle, with a suitable introduction(*), as we meet Lee while he’s strutting down the street in cowboy boots and hat, tugging on a vape pen. But the other characters are so well-drawn that it’s easy to imagine the camera following them home for a bit while Lee is sleeping off the latest injury he’s brought upon himself. Dale appears often in sequences where he reads aloud from his diary, and Tim Blake Nelson’s voice is so velvety smooth, it’s startling to realize that somehow, an actor in a show co-starring Keith David and Peter Dinklage sounds even more interesting than they always do. (That said, Keith David gets to quote Hamlet, so it’s not like his own light being hidden under a bushel.) Jeanne Tripplehorn is having a blast as Dale’s caustic widow Betty Jo. And it feels like there are entire parallel narratives to tell about both Ray (Michael Hitchcock), an antiques dealer who usually has to drink heavily to get through encounters with Lee, and Cyrus (Killer Mike), who occasionally publishes Lee’s articles in his skin mag and usually comes to regret it.
(*) That said, it’s only the second-best character introduction of the series. The best is when Lee finds Wendell in the shabby living quarters above the bookstore. “Did you just take a shit in my bathroom?” Lee asks, incredulous. “Indeed I did,” Wendell replies smugly. “It was treacherous.”
Early on in the premiere, Lee punctuates a meeting by pointing finger guns at Frank and declaring, “Gotcha!” He’s so pleased with how he felt the moment came off that he privately recreates it while driving home in his van. This compulsion to celebrate himself in general, and to celebrate such a juvenile, harmless gesture in particular, should be yet another reason to lose all patience with Lee Raybon. But, like everything about The Lowdown, it’s endearing, and fun.
More please, FX. Quickly?
The Lowdown premieres Sept. 23 on FX, with episodes releasing weekly and available the next day on Hulu. I’ve seen the first five of eight episodes.
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