Season 2, Episode 4: ‘Raw Milk’
There is no show I enjoy pressing play on more than “The Lowdown.”
Starting each week’s episode feels like joining the test run of a new amusement-park ride. What will happen after that familiar FX tag? Who knows? But if ever a TV comedy could be said to be breakneck and breathless, it’s “The Lowdown,” and you can bet it will be fun until the ride comes to a complete stop.
The opening act of this week’s episode feels as though the writer Liz Blood and the director Scott Teems challenged themselves to make each scene funnier than the last, and in a completely different way. First, Lee and his ex-wife’s new husband, Johnny, careen through the streets of Tulsa with a bound-and-gagged sheriff’s deputy in the trunk. The two men, pumping adrenaline, inflame one another’s profane panic.
Lee decides to make this the problem of Cyrus, his editor at the Tulsa Beat, and Damon, Cyrus’s lawyer cousin. “You brought a bound and gagged cop to my place of business!” the newspaperman explodes.
“Technically, we pulled his pants down,” Johnny adds unhelpfully, unable to explain why.
Lee and Johnny hurriedly hire Damon to be their lawyer, though he leaves them little choice, saying he is a witness for the prosecution until they hire him. “Support Black business,” Cyrus says. But by the time Lee and Johnny return to their car, the deputy has escaped from the locked trunk.
“Is he a contortionist?” Johnny asks, beside himself. “Who is this man, Lee?” He’s just a spry cop waddling down the street in the middle of the night with his pants around his ankles. That’s the image over which the opening title appears, with a sly cover of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” by JD McPherson playing on the soundtrack.
After placing a quick call to Ginger, who’s out searching for Mekko, Lee barges in on his lawyer friend Dan in order to hide the deputy’s gun in his safe. He discovers that Dan is playing host to Lee’s father, Frog, and what a conversation they’re having! Frog is giving the unhappily polyamorous Dan advice on the lifestyle, dropping gems like: “Beards do not fare well in an orgy, I can tell you that right now”; “It takes an evolved man to orgy”; and “If those lights aren’t dimmed, you get up and dim them yourself.” Part of you wishes Lee hadn’t interrupted. The rest of you is glad he did.
Lee’s long night’s journey into day ends at Johnny’s dentist office, where he meets up with Ginger and reveals he still has the deputy’s badge, saying it’s the same guy she shot through her window. Lee reluctantly submits to reconstructive dental surgery on his tooth, but by the time all three have had varying doses of nitrous oxide, he is having a grand old time.
After that, the (relatively) serious story lines begin. Lee and Ginger meet up with Jeff Morgan (Kirk Fox), a louche public defender and big fan of Ginger’s who represented Nathan Spence, the 19-year-old whose death in county lockup Mekko knows something about.
Jeff, who says he’s been exiled from Tulsa to man an outpost, like the Night’s Watch in “Game of Thrones,” reveals (between clumsy come-ons) that he did care about Nathan. The young man was supposed to have been under supervised employment when he died, not behind bars. When Ginger and Jeff pay a visit to Nathan’s mother, Deborah (Laura Spencer), she is blunt in her assessment of what happened: “They killed him.”
At the same time, Lee hits up the local paper for leads after discovering that its star advice columnist is none other than Dale, the angel of mercy who had picked him up on the side of the highway. Despite their seemingly similar temperaments, the two men differ on the duty of a journalist. “Tell the truth and shame the devil” is Lee’s credo. “You think if you tell the truth and depress everybody, it makes the world a better place,” Dale replies. He prints the good news, not the bad.
But Dale’s human-interest beat has granted him the knowledge Lee seeks: He’s about to cover a hog contest at a 4-H fair, and Jeff’s public enemy No. 1 in the Spence case, Sheriff Vela Thorne (a magnificently swaggering Martha Plimpton), will be there. Introduced to us in the form of close-ups on her mani-pedi, as if she hadn’t a care in the world, this is clearly one lawwoman who fears no challengers.
Considering how things go with Lee at the fair, she is correct to be confident. The truthstorian confronts her about Spence’s death in jail, but not before chugging an entire bottle of raw milk, a favorite beverage of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The unpasteurized dairy drink gives Lee explosive diarrhea, as it is wont to do. Lonnie, the deputy Lee briefly kidnapped, reclaims his badge and stands guard to arrest Lee the moment the poor man steps out of his Porta-Potty.
By now, Sheriff Thorne has made her feelings about “busybodies” like Lee, Ginger and even Deborah abundantly clear. She jails Lee as a person of interest in the death of ex-prison guard Chili Franks … then brings in Chili’s actual murderer, his fellow guard McMann, introducing him as her cousin. Lonnie is present too, making it all one big conspiracy.
The crooked cops belief Lee and Ginger know where Mekko is, so they grant him his one phone call to summon her. But the number Lee has written on the inside of his boot isn’t hers. It belongs to “Big D,” most likely the powerful Republican gubernatorial candidate Donald Washberg, whose brother’s murder Lee solved last season. Does this mean Kyle MacLachlan is returning? (Is that gum you like going to come back in style?)
Meanwhile, in a side plot, Marty and Ray infiltrate an underground auction for collectors of black-market Indigenous antiquities. Frog, whose shifty career began when he participated in illegal archaeological digs as a teenager, tags along.
For his part, Ray doesn’t believe a word Frog says. The man claims John Huston’s film “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” was just a cover for the director to literally search for treasure; “I heard him tell somebody he invented the ThighMaster,” Ray notes. But Frog is a bona fide (if less than savory) expert in the field of stolen artifacts, having stolen many himself. He even steals one, or re-steals one, from the auction, leaving a pinback button from his jacket in its place, like a Batman villain leaving a clue.
Perhaps the two cases will come together in the end. Indeed, the more Lee wants to get rid of his father, the more likely it seems Frog, a self-styled Indiana Jones, will stick around. But these are mysteries I am content to watch play out at the creative team’s leisure. This constantly surprising show is very much about the hugely enjoyable journey, not the destination.
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