“There’s nothing worse than a white man who cares.” A character named Marty, played by the great Keith David, issues this lament i the premiere episode of the FX crime drama The Lowdown. The white man in question is the show’s protagonist, Lee Raybon, an anticorruption crusader investigating a powerful family in his home city of Tulsa, Okla. And although Marty may be the first to diagnose his affliction, he is not the only person of color in this story who suspects our hero’s bravery and righteousness—traits that those who doubt him might call foolhardiness and sanctimony—stem, in part, from his privilege. Whether this means he’s uniquely positioned to topple Goliaths or bound to lose and too blithely self-assured to realize it remains to be seen.
His predicament combines the perspectives of two Lowdown executive producers: creator Sterlin Harjo, best known for the transcendent FX coming-of-age dramedy Reservation Dogs, and Ethan Hawke, who stars as Lee. A self-styled “truthstorian,” which is a quirky way of saying he’s an investigative journalist bent on exposing historical injustices, Lee is shambolic, tenacious, hyperliterate yet earthy, and a bit wild-eyed, with a paucity of concern for his own safety and a searing social conscience. Characters like this have become Hawke’s specialty. The 2018 film First Reformed cast him as a minister whose painful past coalesces with an environmentalist awakening in an epic crisis of faith. His performance here most recalls his tragicomic portrayal of John Brown, the heroic but unhinged abolitionist whose quixotic raid on Harpers Ferry helped catalyze the Civil War, in Showtime’s 2020 adaptation of James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird. That The Lowdown makes passing reference to Brown is surely no coincidence.
But if Lee constitutes familiar ground for Hawke, he’s practically terra incognita for Harjo, an indie filmmaker of Seminole and Muscogee descent whose work has always centered Native Americans. His choice to follow up the kaleidoscopic Rez Dogs, which launched the careers of its young, Indigenous cast, with a star vehicle in a trendy genre might raise eyebrows. Yet the shows have more in common than the many overlapping names in their credits. Rez Dogs was, at its core, a portrait of a community. A funny, shaggy, character-rich mystery that can’t quite equal its predecessor but is still first-rate TV, The Lowdown interrogates what it really means to serve one’s community. In his defiance o a social order that incentivizes individual greed and punishes solidarity and truth telling, Lee embodies the often professed, rarely tested belief that those born with structural advantages owe something to their neighbors.
The Lowdown bills itself as a “Tulsa noir,” and the location is just as crucial to its atmosphere as is the knowingly pulpy style. Born, raised, educated in, and still a resident of Oklahoma, Harjo has set almost all of his projects in the state. “Rez Dogs was my love letter to rural Oklahoma and where I grew up,” he said in a recent interview. “The Lowdown is my love letter to Tulsa, where I currently live.” Its fond yet critical depiction of a dust-caked 21st century melting pot—situated at the intersection of the Southern and Western U.S. and bursting with big personalities of all ages, classes, backgrounds, and identities—revolves around the quaint block that houses the rare-book shop Lee owns and lives above. A record store and a 24-hour diner with a neon sign give the neighborhood a nostalgic feel that complements the show’s noir aesthetic and grounds a tale whose lead is in constant, chaotic motion.
The catalyst for Lee’s latest frenzy is the death of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), the disfavored scion of a locally influential clan about whom Lee recently published a scathing exposé. While authorities are quick to rule the fatal gunshot wound self-inflicted, and some speculate that the article drove Dale to suicide, Lee knows enough about the Washbergs to suspect foul play. There was tension within the family. Though married to Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn, a hoot in femme-fatale mode), Dale was rumored to be gay. His widow doesn’t exactly look too broken up; less than a week after his death, Lee spots her snuggling with Dale’s brother Donald, an oleaginous candidate for governor played by Kyle MacLachlan. (Naming a potentially villainous mogul turned
politician Donald is hardly a subtle choice, but Harjo avoids belaboring the point by staying focused on his fictionalized Oklahoma.)
Lee tools tirelessly around Tulsa, collecting clues about what really happened to Dale by any means necessary. He digs into a mysterious company that has been buying up property in diverse, working-class North Tulsa and goes undercover with white supremacists. His adventures give the show a bit of the manic unpredictability that made Rez Dogs so much fun. (One wild digression involves backwoods caviar bootleggers.) But this is a bloody business. We know Lee is onto something, in part, because people keep beating him up. The bandages and bruises only underline the physicality of Hawke’s performance. Wiry and wired, Lee, in his almost masochistic willingness to endure pain in service of his cause, calls back to First Reformed’s self-destructive zealot.
His ability to bounce back after getting shoved into car trunks and having his neck used as an ashtray lends the show’s violence a cartoonish quality.
What makes The Lowdown more than a self-aware genre exercise, though, is the way Harjo challenges Lee’s hubris. Over the course of the five episodes I screened (out of eight total), he’s increasingly forced to confront the reality that he is not invincible. His body is aging. A cranky old buddy played by Peter Dinklage, in an Emmy-worthy guest appearance, is a cautionary tale about how idealism can curdle, turning someone like Lee into “one of those people who hates everything.” He still cares for a long-suffering ex (Kaniehtiio Horn, a.k.a. Rez Dogs’ Deer Lady) who is the mother of his bright teenage daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong, excellent). Especially once Francis starts tagging along on his missions, Lee has to acknowledge that he’s endangering the people he loves. Which means he must work out what is worth sacrificing in service of his precious truth.
Reservation Dogs was one of television’s rare masterpieces, woven from a lifetime’s worth of observations and obsessions, existential struggles and in-jokes, and shot through with a sparkling thread of spirituality. Its teenage characters, scheming to realize their dead friend’s dream of moving to California, are a skeleton key that unlocks a multigenerational Indigenous community. Death permeates life in an echo of Harjo’s films; Four Sheets to the Wind unfolds in the wake of a suicide, while Barking Water chronicles a terminally ill man’s final road trip. Another of his abiding themes is the choice young Native Americans face, of whether to stay home and preserve shrinking communities or represent them in the outside world; Rez Dogs explores it thoroughly, showing empathy to characters no matter what they decide. Harjo has said that he and co-creator Taika Waititi’s aim was to “capture what it felt like to hear your aunts and uncles telling stories and lying and exaggerating and talking about mythology and superstitions.”
It’s the kind of all-encompassing artistic statement that can be made only once. The Lowdown is, by necessity, a more limited undertaking that nonetheless succeeds on its own terms. Like Rez Dogs, it’s kinetic. Both shows mix humor, philosophy, and principled outrage, riding the roller coaster of daily life in a world of stunning beauty and glaring injustice instead of conforming to any prepackaged TV format. The Lowdown, too, draws on Harjo’s personal experience, in this case collaborating with reporters on documentaries for the Tulsa media company This Land Press.
I can’t say, because I don’t know how the season ends, whether Lee turns out to be the kind of saint who’s effective enough in his fanaticism to save Tulsa from malign forces, or if he’s just laboring under his own white-guy delusions of grandeur. He’s such an outsize presence that it takes a while to realize how little we’re told about his past. Yet Harjo deepens his conflict, between the personal and the communal, with every episode. Introduced as a stranger at the diner, Marty, another lover of literature, becomes Lee’s foil—a Black man who has put aside moral qualms in pursuit of prosperity but is increasingly unhappy with the person he’s become.
What is clear from Harjo’s body of work is that for him, the individuals who come together to form the communities we call home are, in all their imperfections, the very reason to defend those communities from anyone who would do them harm. In The Lowdown, those people include Deidra (Siena East), the sardonic Indigenous bookstore clerk who scoffs at a retreat for “white ladies doing sweat lodges,” and Ray (Michael Hitchcock), a savvy gay antiques dealer who gets swept up in Lee’s
investigation. It includes tabloid editor Cyrus (Michael “Killer Mike” Render), whose salacious cover lines and well-founded wariness toward Lee belie his wisdom and loyalty. It even includes us—the viewers who, as Harjo immerses us in his vividly populated, deeply humanistic fictions, become part of those communities too.
The post FX’s The Lowdown Is One of the Year’s Best Crime Dramas appeared first on TIME.
