TRULY UNMISSABLE

TV’s Best Series Gets Better in Exhilarating Second Season

“The Lowdown,” Ethan Hawke’s hilariously crazy detective show, is must-see television.

With its second season, The Lowdown continues to be the best show on television—and quite frankly, it’s not close.

In terms of craft, character, comedy, and a sense of time, place, atmosphere, culture, politics, and history, the FX series from creator Sterlin Harjo (Reservation Dogs) is bursting with colorful, poignant, charming life.

With Ethan Hawke giving the most delightful performance of his illustrious career, a supporting cast (now including a phenomenal Tommy Lee Jones and Betty Gilpin) that couldn’t be more attuned to the material’s spirit, and a wealth of small, vital touches to embellish its serpentine neo-noir story, it’s great in ways its contemporaries can’t touch and the undisputed highlight of an already excellent TV year.

Requiring only passing knowledge of its first go-round, The Lowdown’s return engagement (Oct. 14) picks up with Tulsa, Oklahoma bookstore owner, independent reporter, and self-proclaimed “truthstorian” Lee Raybon (Hawke) as he prepares to accept an award for “citizen journalist of the year.” Lee is proud of this honor but, as an inveterate anti-establishment rabble-rouser, deeply uncomfortable with the success it represents. At the ceremony, he makes a predictably sloppy, embarrassing mess of himself, upsetting his daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), in the process.

Less turned off, however, is Ginger Lafferty (Emmy-winning Widow’s Bay star Gilpin), an alluring public defender who asks him to deduce if she’s being followed. She is, and to evade her pursuers, she leaves Lee with a giant kiss—thus cementing his romantic interest in her.

Trouble has a habit of finding Lee, and he welcomes its arrival, and in The Lowdown, lots of it lands on his doorstep, some of it his own making and more than a bit of it due to the sorts of twists of fate that are the province of pulp paperback detective stories. Driven by a “punk rock” ethos that requires him to sometimes “blow things up,” Lee soon learns from Ginger that she’s being stalked because she’s been looking into the disappearance of an incarcerated client named Mekko Dean, whom she used to talk to but now can’t reach or gain permission to see at the prison.

Believing this could make for a potentially juicy story, Lee starts sleuthing. Before long, he deduces that Ginger’s suspicions are correct and that something is amiss in his beloved hometown.

Hawke’s Lee remains a grade-A screw-up who’s perpetually battered and bruised, incessantly rat-a-tat-tat ranting about himself and the injustices and conspiracies around him, and can’t go through a metal detector without earning side-eyes for his chaotic clumsiness. He’s a comic creation par excellence, and Hawke’s performance is so funny and charismatic that it’s impossible not to root for the cocky, zealous, clownish crusader even while heartily laughing at him.

Gilpin’s Ginger is an ideal foil for the activist journalist, exhibiting enough frazzled frustration and terror to make them a kindred pair, and yet repeatedly responding to his over-the-topness with a stream of hilariously sarcastic retorts and under-her-breath comments that keep their combativeness high.

Hawke and Gilpin are a match made in Elmore Leonard-esque gumshoe heaven, and The Lowdown’s second season manages to provide its protagonist with another worthy counterpart in Oscar-winner Jones’ Frog, who’s discovered by police wandering along a rural road looking to “settle some scores,” and who turns out to be—spoiler alert!—Lee’s absentee (and much-reviled) father.

With a bushy gray mustache and chin hair, and a look of sly wildness in his eyes and a cornucopia of tall tales and eccentric opinions on his tongue, Frog is clearly the old block off which Lee chipped, and his appearance does not make his offspring happy, especially once the wayward paterfamilias begins cozying up to Francis.

Harjo spins his yarn with the utmost confidence, his plotting twisting this way and that to entangle Lee in a web that eventually involves menacing prison guards, a crooked sheriff, a nasty judge, and other assorted ne’er-do-wells. Every one of those supporting figures is played by a phenomenal actor (no more spoilers here about which ones) and is carved as distinctly as Lee and Ginger.

So too are Lee’s familiar friends, from store employee Dierdre (Siena East) and Native gangster bodyguard Waylon (Cody Lightning) to low-rent lawyer Dan (Macon Blair), tabloid rag owner Cyrus (Killer Mike), and Keith David’s Marty, who winds up on the hunt for rare artifacts with Frog and antique dealer Ray (Michael Hitchcock).

The creator/showrunner doesn’t let a scene or exchange go by without something amusing or intriguing happening, and he fills out his action with tiny gestures, bits of dialogue, and offhand shots—of Tulsa’s landscape and its animal and human inhabitants—which give the proceedings their convincingly authentic mood.

Whether he’s introducing audiences (and Lee) to the term “rupidoop,” staging pratfalls and indulging in weirdo asides, or simply reveling in Hawke’s roundabout back-and-forths with Gilpin and Jones, Harjo demonstrates a mastery of character and tone in The Lowdown. His transitional fades and country music soundtrack neatly and evocatively tie the package together, and as Lee’s mission evolves from a straightforward, ordinary inquiry into a wide-ranging campaign to bring down the rich and powerful, the series proves consistently witty and surprising.

There’s no telling where Lee is headed, only that he’ll get there in a haphazard, bumbling—if ultimately triumphant—fashion, and Hawke’s rich, ridiculous embodiment of the hero is all the more compelling for being simultaneously real and soulful. He’s a classical detective in an idiosyncratic mold and with an intellectual and ragamuffin personality all his own.

Steeped in erudite references while also partaking in riotous buffoonery, The Lowdown is the best of all worlds, melding the high and low, the serious and the stupid, with exhilarating deftness. Asked why he abandoned his son years earlier, Jones’ character tells Lee that’s what everyone does: “Leave and come back.”

If that’s true, let’s hope that Harjo’s superlative series follows suit and, at the conclusion of this season, returns to the small screen right quick.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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