Oklahoma is having a cultural moment. The Thunder are NBA champions. My brother and sister-in-law just uprooted to the Sooner State. And, with The Lowdown, Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo is staking a claim as the state’s TV laureate (to differentiate him from Joy Harjo, no relation and our former national poet laureate).
A shaggy dog mystery-comedy in the vein of Terriers and Lodge 49 — which is to say “very much my jam” and “very much destined for niche viewership” — Harjo’s follow-up to one of television’s great half-hours of the decade/century/ever is still finding its way, based on the five episodes sent to critics. And “its way” is an endearingly meandering way, one in which the murder mystery at its center is only meant to be loosely compelling.
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The Lowdown
The Bottom Line Harjo & Hawke are a potent combo.
Airdate: 9 p.m. Tuesday, September 23 (FX)
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Keith David, Kyle MacLachlan, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kaniehtiio Horn, Michael “Killer Mike” Render, Tim Blake Nelson and Tracy Letts
Creator: Sterlin Harjo
Instead of asking viewers to invest in a whodunit or howdunit or whydunit, The Lowdown offers immersion in Tulsa and its environs, an embrace of Oklahoma’s contemporary melting pot, in which artistic oddballs, fringe right-wing bigots, deep-rooted Indigenous communities and more butt heads for available resources, power and visibility. Harjo’s affectionate but thoroughly clear-eyed love for his home state saturates every frame and informs every reference in an intentionally messy and varied tapestry, stitched together with lovable eccentrics, lived-in settings and an Oklahoma-infused musicality.
Disclaimer: As much as Oklahoma is a lead character in The Lowdown and the impeccable cast is peppered with native sons, the series couldn’t exist without Texas-born, New York-raised star Ethan Hawke, whose guest-starring role in the final season of Reservation Dogs was subject to perhaps the most egregious Emmys snub since Hawke’s work in The Good Lord Bird. As impossible as it is to imagine The Lowdown stripped of its regional authenticity to film in Atlanta — hi, “Tulsa” King — or Vancouver, it’s equally impossible to imagine the series without Hawke, whose world-weary, rough-around-the-edges performance continues to cement his place as one of our most essential and constantly evolving leading men. He’s a messy wonder and the show around him seems more than capable of rising to his level.
Hawke plays Lee Raybon, a self-described “Tulsa truthstorian.”
On a practical level, Lee owns and operates a platonic ideal of a used bookstore, sleeping in a disorderly office above its dusty collection of literature. The bookstore definitely doesn’t pay Lee’s bills, but then again neither does his other job, which is writing reported features in Tulsa’s apparently robust journalistic scene. That might explain why Lee is having trouble meeting his financial obligations to his ex-wife (Kaniehtiio Horn) and teenage daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). Francis, fortunately, loves Lee anyway and is fully prepared to get involved in his current troubles in the name of daddy-daughter time.
See, Lee’s most recent piece, related to the shady past of the wealthy Washberg family, has caused some ripples. For one thing, Donnie Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan) is running for governor and doesn’t love the bad publicity. For a bigger thing, Donnie’s brother Dale (Tim Blake Nelson) is newly deceased, seemingly by his own hand, but Lee has doubts.
As he continues his investigation into the Washbergs, Lee becomes embroiled with Dale’s widow (Jeanne Tripplehorn’s Betty Jo), a literature-quoting private investigator named Marty (Keith David), a gay antiquarian (Michael Hitchcock’s Ray), a couple of skinheads, several members of the Indian Mafia, some bootleg caviar dealers and anybody else standing in the way of the search for the truth.
Pushing Lee forward are a series of letters that Dale left in his collection of Jim Thompson first editions. Thompson was also born in Oklahoma, which is a common thread almost any time an author or musician features prominently in this show.
Pieces of Thompson’s pulpy DNA are visible in the Dust Bowl noir of The Lowdown, though I’m gonna say that the series has more in common with the comically picaresque criminality of Charles Portis (True Grit, The Dog of the South), who had the misfortune of being born in Arkansas and not its neighbor to the west. Either way, The Lowdown finds Harjo dipping into pleasantly familiar reservoirs of fiction in which the protagonists know how to take a constant beating, the malefactors are all suspiciously verbose and ostentatious hats abound.
You’ve seen conspiracy-addicted characters like Lee before, and certainly the other characters all think they have his number.
“You’ve probably got one of those thingamajigs pinned to the wall with little crazy strings connecting it all. A conspiracy board!” Marty accuses Lee in one of their first interactions. And, indeed, Lee has a very robust conspiracy board, one that traces the city’s current adversity back to the Tulsa Riots.
The series, though, functions as Harjo’s own conspiracy board of sorts. It’s a delightful rush of linked elements, both within the text, as Lee follows the clues in hopes of understanding Dale’s death, and external to the text, inviting viewers to make their own connections.
My notes are littered with linkages, some obvious and intentional and some bordering on deranged, all based around still more Oklahoma references. It’s like how the art of Joe Brainard, Tulsa-born, plays a major part in the series but also connects to Reservation Dogs, in which a copy of I Remember featured in the episode “Deer Lady,” where it was being read by the eponymous mystical character played by… Kaniehtiio Horn. When Lee enters a scene accompanied by the music of Chet Baker, is that because Baker was born in Oklahoma or because Ethan Hawke played Baker in the feature Born to Be Blue? Having Lee singing “John Brown’s Body” or, in one scene, posing as an “Agent Cooper” in a series that already features Kyle MacLachlan are the sort of playful touches that require minimal knowledge and no acknowledgment.
All of that could make it sound like The Lowdown is too clever by half, but it’s mostly a show in which characters are engaged with the world around them and always eager for small talk as a distraction from the possible murder and tragedy that would otherwise be a bummer. Relationships are built on ongoing debates, recurring rituals and favorite gathering spots, all adding to the impression that this particular misadventure for Lee is just the latest shaggy-dog chapter in a shaggy-dog life of misadventures.
Lee is an archetype that becomes less and less endearing as a character ages. What’s rascally and charming for a 20-something becomes a near-tragic product of Peter Pan Syndrome when you’re in your mid-50s. Hawke’s great gift is in conveying hints of the youthful Lee, the sort of anti-establishment hipster that overpopulates gentrified cities, alongside a growing awareness of the consequences of the life he has chosen. The latter comes through especially well in scenes with Francis, played by Armstrong as polished and precocious in a way that Lee must have been at some point. Hawke’s got a great wardrobe, hair that often seems to be giving a performance of its own and the necessary lack of ego to perfectly embody a man who’s effortlessly cool and exhaustingly pathetic at the same time.
For most of the supporting cast, excellence is just a matter of opportunity. Tripplehorn, for example, feels wholly wasted for the first few episodes and then, in the fourth episode, when Betty Jo and Lee reach a temporary understanding, she’s every bit the formerly trashy rodeo queen trying to be a high-society belle. (I hope that Kaniehtiio Horn, a favorite from her Letterkenny days, eventually gets a similar opportunity, because her underuse is one of my few sources of disappointment). Hitchcock seems like he’s just there to steal a scene or two, but the third episode, in which Ray, Lee and Francis go on a mission, he’s funny and briefly, beautifully sad. Nelson, yet another Oklahoman, is surprisingly poetic and spritely for a guy playing a character who, as I’ve already said, dies in the opening scene of the series.
From here, I could practically go down the ensemble sheet listing standouts. For Keith David, this is another successful genre throwback following his welcome scenery-chewing in Duster, though I’m still waiting to get a full read on the character. Cody Lightning, Macon Blair, Scott Shepherd and the currently ubiquitous Tracy Letts — sorry, that should be “Tulsa-born Tracy Letts” — are among the many scene-stealers supplied by casting directors Angelique Midthunder and Jennifer Garrett.
Harjo, who wrote the pilot and directed the first three episodes, sets such a cool and easygoing vibe (despite all of the jeopardy Lee finds himself in) that it was only in the fourth episode that I started wishing the show had just a little more gravity. Fortunately, the fifth episode brings in Peter Dinklage for a hilarious and raw guest turn, echoing the original premise of Reservation Dogs and supplying an injection of that weight I’d been missing. The fifth episode (like the fourth, directed by Macon Blair) is such an effortless tonal flex that it suggests just how much range this cast and this premise are capable of providing, albeit with just three more episodes to go in the season.
I started off by comparing The Lowdown to Terriers and Lodge 49, because those are shows I loved and it felt like a compliment. But those are also two shows that had fairly short lives and have spent subsequent years accumulating viewers who got to be pleased and then disappointed by their discoveries. The Lowdown doesn’t reach that Reservation Dogs pinnacle instantly, but Harjo and FX have another winner here, if people would just tune in.