Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) wears his troubles on his face. Over the first five episodes of FX’s “The Lowdown,” we see Lee — a Tulsa writer and “truthstorian” who specializes in local exposés — get beat up, burned, wrestled, abducted (multiple times) and beat up some more. He dons shades to cover black eyes and acquires a growing collection of bandages and bruises. A friend marvels that every time he sees Lee, “You somehow look worse.”
But looking worse somehow looks good on Lee, and on this feisty, delightful journo-noir. In his comedy “Reservation Dogs,” Sterlin Harjo created an intimate picture of community and coming-of-age on an Oklahoma reservation. In “The Lowdown,” whose eight-episode season begins Tuesday on FX, he stays within state lines but widens his lens, with a scrappy story of corruption, power and the ways in which seeking the truth can require the willingness to take a beating.
For Lee, the battle begins and ends on the page. He runs a rare-books store in downtown Tulsa, whose tenuous earnings support his investigative habit, and occasionally quotes David Foster Wallace. (In a telling choice, the first shot we see of Lee focuses on a pen he’s holding.)
His most recent piece, a dive into the corrupt history of the powerful Washberg family, is followed by the “suicide” of the family’s black sheep, Dale (Tim Blake Nelson). To Lee, the suicide looks a lot like a murder, a suspicion he chases following a literal paper trail of clues Dale left behind in a collection of pulp-crime paperbacks.
So begins a thoughtful, picaresque-pulp conspiracy story, abetted by an absolutely stacked cast. Lee’s inquiries lead him to Dale’s ambitious brother, Donald (Kyle MacLachlan), a candidate for governor; to Dale’s widow, Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who is suspiciously close with Donald; and to Frank Martin (Tracy Letts), a wealthy businessman who is buying out a suspicious number of Black-owned properties in North Tulsa.
Lee soon attracts the attention of Donald’s private investigator, Marty (Keith David), as well as an assortment of thugs and villains. (Scott Shepherd stands out as a shady developer whose gaze could freeze lava.) Lee doesn’t have power or money, but he has a rascally charm and friends in low places, and “The Lowdown” glories in filling out a world of hustlers, scam artists, skinheads and antique dealers (who it turns out can be just as scary).
In Lee, Hawke, who memorably guest-starred in one of the best “Reservation Dogs” episodes, has a character that fits his late-career strengths like an old pair of jeans: a weathered local crank and wild man, principled sometimes to the point of insufferableness. Like Hawke’s outsize John Brown in the 2020 mini-series “The Good Lord Bird,” there is something of the holy righteous lunatic to Lee. (“There’s nothing worse than a white man who cares,” Marty tells him.)
The historian’s own history, “The Lowdown” suggests, is checkered. He’s divorced, with a smart, scrappy teen daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) he’s trying to maintain a relationship with and an ex-wife (Kaniehtiio Horn of “Reservation Dogs”) to whom he struggles to prove his trustworthiness. You get the feeling that Lee is the kind of guy driven to solve mysteries in part because he feels that finding an answer will fix something in himself.
The series’s wry voice and dusty Oklahoma local color will be familiar to fans of “Reservation Dogs,” though “The Lowdown” also has something in common with regionally specific dramas like “Justified.” But where “Justified” had its literary roots in the crime stories of Elmore Leonard, this show’s icons are the likes of Jim Thompson, the hard-boiled novelist whose work figures into the plot, and Lee Roy Chapman, the Oklahoma citizen journalist who inspired Lee’s character.
As funny as it can be, “The Lowdown” is distinctively in the noir crime fiction tradition of assuming that all institutions — government, politics, business, the police — are untrustworthy and up for sale, and that the truth will only be found, if at all, by committed outsiders willing to lose a lot. (Seeing Lee’s collection of facial bandages can’t help but remind one of Jake Gittes in “Chinatown.”)
The difference between Lee and the standard noir detective is that his ultimate case is history. He’s driven above all by his warts-and-all love for Tulsa, which serves the detective-story role of the beautiful client who can betray you and break your heart.
Like “Reservation Dogs,” “The Lowdown” is shot through with local character. It also has a timely theme about the vitality of local journalism at a time when small independent outlets are disappearing. (This in a way parallels “The Paper,” though that “Office” spinoff stumbles because it lacks any real sense of place.) It believes that information, even the ugly truth, is the nervous system of a town; take that away, and you leave behind a zombie.
“The Lowdown” does not shape up as the world’s twistiest or most clever mystery. (I’ve seen five episodes of the season’s eight.) Its antagonists are fairly obviously nefarious, and its plot turns sometimes lean on coincidence.
What really drives “The Lowdown,” though, is charm and fighting spirit. It’s sufficient to know that there’s dirt to be dug and secrets to be uncovered; the appeal is meeting the motley free spirits who help and hinder Lee in doing the digging. Journalism isn’t always pretty, “The Lowdown” suggests, but its scars give it character.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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