‘The Lowdown’ is a Vibe

The Lowdown has been renewed for another season. Here is our review from October 6, 2025.

Bedraggled, beat up, burnt (literally, with a cigarette) freelance writer Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) doesn’t seem like much of a hero in the first few episodes of the new FX series The Lowdown.

Raybon writes exposés about skinheads and political families with secrets for a reputable alt newspaper (“Long-form magazine,” he frequently corrects) in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as one that features pictures of strippers on its front page. He’s struggling to make child-support payments but evinces a high sense of self regard, amusing himself with stuff he’s said to rich businesspeople and wearing rural-hipster outfits meant to draw attention, like a Halloween costume packaged as, “Cowboy-Noir Journalist.”

But Raybon is also doggedly committed to the truth as a concept, and telling that truth no matter how many punches he takes, which makes him something of an anomaly on TV, or anywhere else, in 2025.

And it doesn’t matter if you like Raybon, or even buy him as a protagonist, in Sterlin Harjo’s very entertaining first project since his three-season run as the creator of Reservation Dogs, one of the finest TV comedies of the last 15 years.

Reservation Dogs started as a scruffy comedy about teens on an Oklahoma reservation and turned into a cry-your-eyes-out dramedy that deepened as it went. The Lowdown shares DNA with its predecessor – a lived-in, edge-of-town specificity of place and lots of memorable characters – but so far has a very different trajectory as a neo-noir that begins with a suicide and goes down a series of conspiracy rabbit holes.

When the series starts, Raybon has just published a story about a history of corruption in the family of gubernatorial candidate Donald Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan). The blowback from the story and the suicide of the candidate’s brother (Tim Blake Nelson, chatty even in death) sets the story in motion.

It’s too early to say, three episodes in, whether the story will lead to a twisty array of red herrings, reversals and a satisfying ending like any decent noir mystery, but so far that doesn’t seem to matter. Harjo has populated this corner of Tulsa with so many brutal thugs, margarita-sipping matriarchs (Jeanne Tripplehorn), loving teen daughters, a well-meaning private detective (Keith David, so brilliant recently in Duster), and droll southern antique collectors (Michael Hitchcock), that even if you don’t like Raybon as a character, you’ll be thrilled to see him bumble his way through interactions with all of them.

And while it has a darker tone than Reservation Dogs, Lowdown is riotously funny at times, taking absurd detours and injecting wry humor and weird characters, like a potent mix of Elmore Leonard, Fletch, and whatever filmmaking magic Harjo mastered on Dogs that makes even shots of dirty neighborhoods look like they should be hanging in a gallery.

Hawke, who appeared in one of the final episodes of Reservation Dogs, turns out to be an ideal partner for Harjo’s sensibilities, eschewing all vanity to play a frequently bloodied underdog who has a higher purpose. That he constantly reminds everyone about that higher purpose (he has a self-invented title: “Truthstorian”) should make Raybon an insufferable character; yet, somehow, with Hawke’s portrayal, it works.

So far, The Lowdown is a slow burn, a series that’s not afraid to let its characters talk at length or to let a landscape shot breathe in between sporadic moments of Coen Brothers-like surprise violence. Sometimes, Raybon is just trying to talk his way out of trouble, usually at gunpoint.

In the third episode, in pursuit of a set of books that might offer clues to the Washberg brother’s death, Raybon ends up on a boat, held by bootlegging caviar hunters. That he manages a way out not with fists or weapons but by helping one of the fishermen write a letter to his lost love is a testament to how surprising and unique The Lowdown can be.

Three episodes in, The Lowdown has set a tone and delivered a unique and wonderful vibe. Long may Raybon pursue the truth.