One day last spring, a man in snug trousers, cowboy boots and a hat with a rattlesnake band (tail included), strode past an array of low-slung buildings just north of downtown Tulsa.
A posse of sorts swirled all around him as the skyline shimmered on the distant horizon. The heat had a physical weight. You half-expected a lonesome train whistle to cut across the afternoon, but life isn’t a country song, not even in Tulsa, and — oh wait, there it is.
The whistle was actually a hassle, given that this humble apartment complex had been transformed into a TV set for “The Lowdown,” an eight-episode crime drama premiering Sept. 23 on FX and the next day on Hulu. (Trains tend to ignore assistant directors calling for quiet.) Ethan Hawke, the man in the hat, stars as a muckraking journalist named Lee Raybon, a self-styled “truthstorian” making enemies all over Tulsa as he investigates a mysterious death involving one of the city’s most powerful families.
Hawke ambled through the grassy courtyard, his face bearing the made-up scars of the many beatings truthstorian-ing entails. He ducked into a building to rehearse with the great character actor Graham Greene, giving one of his final performances. Everywhere else people in headsets ran around, stood around, sought shade in the video tent.
Sterlin Harjo, the creator and showrunner, walked up in a flat-brimmed hat of his own and tinted glasses, large diamond-shaped studs in his earlobes. He looked around.
“It feels strangely like I’m back on ‘Rez Dogs,’” he said.
He was referring to the modest brown brick houses beneath an enormous Oklahoma sky; to the presence of the revered Native actor Greene, a guest star who would die a few months later; to the familiar (and familial) crew that helped Harjo turn “Reservation Dogs,” which ran from 2021-23, into one of the most acclaimed shows of the past decade.
Created by Harjo and Taika Waititi, the series followed the exploits of four friends and their broader community on an Oklahoma reservation. It was a distinctive world rarely seen on TV, one hemmed in by constraints, socioeconomic and otherwise, but defined by the ways that life there transcended them. The show was unmistakably the work of a person who knew intimately such places and the people who lived in them, had grown up among them — moving and poignant, sure, but also hilarious.
“Reservation Dogs” was never a ratings smash or an Emmy darling, somehow receiving only five nominations and no wins over its three seasons. (It won Peabody Awards in 2021 and 2023, and Harjo won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2024.) But people who watched it loved it, critics very much included, and it announced Harjo, 45, as one of the most talented and original voices on television.
It’s what gave him the clout to be standing there, at the center of a big, ambitious series shooting all over his adopted hometown. “The Lowdown” is a crime noir fueled by Harjo’s love of such stories, mashing up the energy of hard-boiled writers like Jim Thompson (whose work figures significantly in the narrative) with the shambolic pace of Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye.” It is also infused, like “Reservation Dogs,” with Harjo’s deep affection for its setting. Harjo grew up in Holdenville, Okla., a small town 90 miles to the south, but he has lived in Tulsa for 18 years and called it “my favorite place in the world.”
“Everything that I do has some sort of personal connection to me,” he said. “If ‘Rez Dogs’ was the rural, this is the city.”
Whatever the parallels, Harjo is definitely not back on “Reservation Dogs.” He’s no longer an unknown creator with a largely unknown cast and modest budgets, making a half-hour show about a world that mostly white TV executives are unlikely to question.
“They couldn’t give him any notes because it was a Native show,” Hawke joked during a break from shooting, an angry gash painted across the bridge of his nose. “But if you’re doing a gumshoe cop thing, everybody’s got an opinion about how you’re supposed to do that.”
Hawke leads a decorated Hollywood cast that includes Keith David, Kyle MacLachlan and a trio of famous Oklahomans: Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tim Blake Nelson and Tracy Letts. FX has heavily promoted the show, which has hourlong episodes and a visibly broader scope, filmed on more than 30 locations in and around the city.
In other words, as Harjo stood amid his production he also occupied another, more precarious spot: that of an acclaimed TV auteur expensively following up the thing that made him famous. Anyone unfamiliar with the potential pitfalls therein perhaps never caught “John From Cincinnati,” “The Romanoffs” or “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” the series right after, respectively, “Deadwood,” “Mad Men” and “The West Wing” in their creators’ filmographies.
What gives Harjo a decent chance to avoid such a fate — and reviews of “The Lowdown” have been mostly glowing — is that he’s spending his clout on a starrier, more expansive story that remains situated in his own backyard. His Tulsa, like the real one, is steeped in corruption and dark history — the site of the infamous Tulsa race massacre is a mile from the production’s home base — but also in the kind of magic and mythology that have made the city a magnet for artists and outsiders.
Which is to say, “The Lowdown” is unmistakably the work of a person who knows intimately the place and the people who live there — suspenseful and poignant, sure, but also hilarious.
“I’m trying to put onscreen my ideas of what my home is,” he said. “Pleasant, rosy depictions of a place are not very interesting to me. I want it all, and I think that’s why noir is my vehicle for that, because you get to talk about all sides.
“It’s about pulling up the rug and finding out what’s underneath.”
THE PHYSICAL AND NARRATIVE HEART of “The Lowdown” sits on a block of East Sixth Street, where set designers have turned a row of old buildings into the headquarters of both Hawke’s Lee and, behind the sets, the production itself.
Homages to Tulsa works that came before it abound. Sweet Emily’s, a note-perfect late-night diner, is named for a song by the singer-songwriter Leon Russell, one of the architects of the shuffling blues-rock-country hybrid known as the Tulsa Sound. (The show’s original title, “The Sensitive Kind,” came from a song by J.J. Cale, another member of that cohort, but FX thought it would be hard to promote.)
The diner’s wallpaper is subtly adorned with scenes from “Reservation Dogs” — squint and you’ll see Spirit sitting on his horse — and the clock is a reference to “Rumble Fish,” Francis Ford Coppola’s second adaptation of the Tulsa novelist S.E. Hinton. (Harjo can expound at length on the first: “The Outsiders.”)
Next to the diner is an ersatz record shop, Lee’s lawyer’s office and his ramshackle bookstore, where a poster for Larry Clark’s legendarily debauched photo collection “Tulsa” hangs behind the register.
“What’s great about it is you don’t have to be from Tulsa to appreciate it,” Tripplehorn said. “But if you do, it makes it really incredibly special.” The actress, who plays a wealthy widow with enigmatic motives, grew up in the city, and her musician father was a contemporary of artists like Russell.
Harjo conceived the idea for “The Lowdown” years ago as a movie, but as “Reservation Dogs” was ending, FX was eager for another series. He laid it out for Hawke when the actor was in town to guest star in an episode late in the final season.
“After it was over, Sterlin and I went for a big, long walk around Tulsa, and he told me about his dream of the show,” Hawke recalled. “It just seemed like a great idea.”
“The Lowdown” coincidentally arrives the same week as a new season of “Tulsa King,” a Paramount+ drama starring Sylvester Stallone as a crime boss. That show moved production out of Oklahoma after its first season — an inconceivable approach to Harjo, who has a kind of spiritual belief in the importance and power of place in a story.
“If you’re [expletive] shooting, like, exteriors, you’re just ‘Friends’ at that point,” he said, referring to “The One With Christmas in Tulsa,” from Season 9. Stallone once wrote on Instagram, “Being in Oklahoma has prepared me for a lifetime in hell,” referring to the heat; Harjo’s production company now sells a T-shirt immortalizing the quote.
Harjo has made five feature films (three narrative and two documentaries), all of them set and shot in Oklahoma. But it was his time making video shorts in the 2010s for This Land Press, a short-lived Tulsa magazine, that most directly influenced “The Lowdown.”
Lee Raybon was inspired by Lee Roy Chapman, a writer and activist Harjo worked with at the magazine who was instrumental in raising awareness of some of the city’s darkest chapters. (Chapman called himself a “history recovery specialist.”)
These included the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, a coordinated attack by white citizens that resulted in the destruction of Greenwood, a prosperous Black neighborhood, and killed up to 300 people. Chapman also revealed that one of the city’s founders, W. Tate Brady, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and was involved in the massacre, prompting the relabeling of local sites named for him.
“Tulsa has a long pattern of sidestepping its history, and Lee Roy was directly confronting it at a time when most people would have preferred to move on,” said Michael Mason, the founder of This Land Press and Chapman’s editor.
Chapman died by suicide in 2015; his mission continues at the Center for Public Secrets, a journalism education center overseen by his sister, Whitney Chapman. His work is available on the center’s website and you can still see the man himself in Harjo’s videos on YouTube, richly bearded in a flat-brim fedora, banging around town in a battered white van much like the one Hawke drives in “The Lowdown.” (In the series The Heartland Press stands in for This Land Press, and Harjo reunited much of the staff for a scene shot in the magazine’s old office.)
The pursuit of truth has only gotten more complex in the age of social media misinformation, which is one reason Harjo thought it would be a powerful engine for a series. “Watching someone struggle to find that truth is something that I think we all kind of need and could take inspiration from in this moment of uncertainty,” he said.
And as the Trump Administration orders the Smithsonian and National Park Service to alter or remove materials on slavery and Native Americans, the historical whitewashing is now happening at the highest levels.
“We’re in a very interesting political time,” said David, who plays a private investigator who comes to admire Lee’s dogged ideals. “The more they try to cover these things up, the more the truth will come out.
“That’s what I love about ‘The Lowdown,’” he continued. “More will be revealed.”
“THE LOWDOWN” INITIALLY SEEMS like an intentional swerve away from the Native stories that made Harjo’s reputation.
The cast is diverse, but the stars are mostly well-known, non-Native actors. The subplot most informed by Harjo’s life surrounds Lee’s shared custody of his daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), reflecting Harjo’s own experiences as a young father. (His now adult daughter works at the Woody Guthrie Center in town, and he also has two school-age children.)
However the presence on set that day of Greene, who had a memorable subplot in the last season of “Reservation Dogs,” was curious.
Asked about it, Hawke said: “There’s no reason for Sterlin to be boxed in where every piece of art he makes has to be about his heritage. It’s not fair. I think some part of him wants to rebel from that.
“But another part of him is deeply connected and cares so much about his community, he can’t help but make it about that anyway.”
Harjo would say only that in classic noir fashion, “The Lowdown” starts with one mysterious death but gradually turns into “this thing that becomes bigger and older,” replete with more bodies and more lethal obstacles between Lee and The Truth.
“Land deals, deaths … clichés,” a character says at one point, a kind of comic meta commentary on the show’s shameless embrace of genre hallmarks. But as usual, Harjo is putting his own spin on them.
“There was a lot of talk around ‘Rez Dogs’ about, ‘We love how it’s funny and dramatic,’” he said. “But I don’t know how to do it another way.”
“With ‘Rez Dogs,’ I had the cultural pressure of being the first show of its kind, and I needed to represent people,” he added. “That’s very difficult, and I’m not doing that here. I’m just trying to tell a story with my sensibilities that also takes place in a city that I love.”
Jeremy Egner is the television editor, overseeing coverage of the medium and the people who make it. He joined The Times in 2008.
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