‘The Lowdown’ Season 2 Review: Sterling Harjo Pairs Ethan Hawke With Betty Gilpin For A Screwball Southern Noir

Just as some filmmakers become cult figures, Sterling Harjo seems to be on his way to becoming a cult TV creator. Not because he is trying to. His shows are funny, accessible, human, rich in local color and filled with plots that, in their own peculiar ways, are genuinely compelling. But there is something about his themes, his settings, his old-school storytelling and his attention to detail that seems to put him at a distance from both mass audiences and awards bodies. Perhaps that is the strangest thing of all. Plenty of shows are overlooked by large audiences but embraced by the Emmys and critics. With Harjo’s series — Reservation Dogs and The Lowdown — critics have responded, but awards organizations have mostly looked the other way. The former received just one Emmy nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series over its three-season run, and lost. The first season of The Lowdown received none.

The neglect is strange because the talent is right there in plain sight. You only have to spend a little time with any of Harjo’s shows to realize that they inhabit a world you simply don’t see anywhere else. Watching the second season —and just looking at the names appearing on screen— you might think someone, somewhere, is finally going to notice. But I’m not so sure. Harjo remains a highly idiosyncratic, very particular creator —a cult figure, basically— for the average awards organization. But if Widow’s Bay won, perhaps this one can finally stick its head above the parapet, too.

The opening scene of Season 2 of The Lowdown almost feels like a response to all of this. After the investigative reporting that drove last season, Lee Raybon Jr. (Ethan Hawke) has been named Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Citizen Journalist of the Year. The man shows up late and high to the ceremony and proceeds to take the stage to accept his award. His speech is chaotic, he is barely steady on his feet, and he uses the occasion to take shots at colleagues who “sell out to commercial interests,” as well as local businessmen and politicians. His job, he says, is to uncover the real Tulsa, to show how its dark history continues to surface in the present. Very few people applaud. Even his daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), flees the room in horror.

The awards ceremony, irony aside, sets in motion the events that will lead Lee into his next investigation. But this time it isn’t a journalistic story so much as a very personal attempt to impress a woman. The only person who seems to appreciate his speech is a woman named Ginger (Betty Gilpin, herself an Emmy winner), a slightly tipsy but seductive attorney who tells the increasingly agitated Lee that some men are following her. In his usual chaotic fashion, he manages to shake the supposed pursuers, and when they meet again later, he offers to help. What she wants is for him to make contact with a client of hers who is in prison — a man named Mekko whom she has been unable to see. Lee is more than happy to oblige.

It’s obvious that the woman —played by Gilpin as a combination of screwball-comedy heroine and femme fatale— is hiding more than she lets on. It is equally obvious, during his first meeting at the prison, that people there are lying to Lee, too. By the second episode —with hamburgers, beer and shotguns entering the picture— it becomes pretty clear that something dark is going on inside the prison. And that is the thread this unconventional investigator, quite possibly the most frequently beaten-up man in television history, will follow as he plunges into the murky world of inmates, guards and various competing interests.

But the richness of The Lowdown tends to be found around the edges of the plot, in its narrative detours, tangents and peculiarities. This is not a show you watch simply to solve a mystery. The mystery is the McGuffin Harjo uses to invite us into this colorful Tulsa world, where a bookstore owner and journalist like Lee crosses paths with editors, Native friends, record-store owners, corrupt politicians, local businessmen, shady cops and a whole collection of characters who are at the very least unusual.

That is where the other major element of the season comes in. And it has the face and mannerisms of Tommy Lee Jones, who plays Lee Sr., Lee’s father, a man he hasn’t seen in years and has told everyone he is dead. But the old man comes back looking for him, wanting to meet his granddaughter and apparently showing signs of dementia. Lee doesn’t believe him —he knows his father is an old con artist and opportunist— but at times it seems as though his intentions might actually be good. Like his son, he can be selfish and hopelessly tangled in his own schemes, but perhaps he has finally reached the point where he needs to let his guard down and reconnect with his family. Or is it all just another con from this old fox who doesn’t appear to have enough money to survive?

Season 2 settles comfortably into the strengths of the first and continues in much the same vein, as a Southern noir that builds a portrait of a community by introducing us to the people surrounding a criminal case with pockets of corruption hidden underneath. The season gets off to a somewhat frantic, chaotic start, much like its two central characters (Gilpin adds at least as much chaos to the equation as Hawke generates all by himself), but it finds its rhythm in the episodes that follow, allowing for longer, richer, more detailed and stranger scenes. There is a terrific conversation between Gilpin and a client (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) whom she manages to persuade, via a foot fetish, to spy for her from inside the prison. Or the encounter between Hawke and a former prison guard (Paul Schneider) who makes “the best hamburgers in town.”

What other streaming series would give you long scenes in which two movie legends like Hawke and Jones simply sit around talking as a father and son who can barely stand each other? Harjo films these exchanges with humor and a certain mischievousness, without ever losing sight of the heavy history behind this pair, behind this relationship. And that is the great secret of The Lowdown. It is entertaining, easygoing, sometimes even downright silly, but it is also very clear about what it is really telling us: the dark history of a city and a state —Oklahoma— with plenty of dirty secrets tucked away under the rug.

Lee Raybon Jr. may not, at least on the surface, seem like the ideal person to drag those secrets into the light. But somebody has to go out there, take the punches and do it. And Lee seems to be the only one willing to.