[This story contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Lowdown season two on FX and Hulu.]
Lee Raybon doesn’t need much help complicating his own life, but two characters who arrive in the season premiere of The Lowdown promise to make things considerably messier for the Tulsa “truthstorian.”
Case in point on Lee not leaving well enough alone: Accepting a journalism award for the big exposé at the center of season one’s story, a nervous Lee (Ethan Hawke) takes a mushroom gummy and proceeds to go off the rails with a speech that basically calls everyone else in the room a sellout and a loser. It earns him a punch in the face (some things don’t change) from another reporter, but also the attention of public defender Ginger (Betty Gilpin), who puts Lee on the scent of what’s going to become the central mystery of this season.
At the same time, and unbeknownst to Lee, his estranged father, Lee Sr. (Tommy Lee Jones), is headed his way. A police officer picks up Senior on a country road, where he’s wandering and seemingly confused, wearing in an ill-fitting suit and red baseball cap — though not that kind of red cap. It has “Pslams 107:29” on the front. The verse reads “He calms the storm, so that its waves are still” in the New King James version of the Bible.
“Seemingly confused” is a key qualifier here, because over the course of The Lowdown’s two-episode opener Wednesday on FX and Hulu, Senior slowly reveals himself to be more aware than he lets on at first. Even when the cop picks him up, Hawke and Jones told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview, he’s not necessarily as addled as he appears to be.
“He’s hustling,” Hawke said with a laugh.
“Yeah, he’s trying to get a free ride into town,” Jones added. “And what better way than to pretend you don’t know the date? He gets a ride precisely to his destination, which is his son’s doorstep.”
Lee is adamant that his dad clear out as soon as possible, but Senior — thanks to having read about Lee’s award — knows he has a granddaughter, and he extracts some more information from Waylon (Cody Lightning), Henry (Jude Barnett) and record store owner Abel (Josh Fadem). The last we see of Senior in Wednesday’s episodes is him introducing himself to Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). It’s not really a spoiler to say that act will lead to a lot of friction between father and daughter, who are already in a less-than-great place after Francis witnesses part of Lee’s award speech and walks out.
Much more willingly, Lee entangles himself with Ginger, who informs him at the awards ceremony that she thinks two men are following her. Lee confirms it, and as a ruse to make the stalkers think they’re together, Ginger kisses Lee before getting in her ride home. Lee, of course, badly misreads the gesture and shows up at her office the next day, where Ginger is (understandably) a little jittery and unsure of what to do. She eventually tells him that a former client of hers, Mekko Dean, whom she still talks to, has seemingly gone missing from prison.
Gilpin’s performance of Ginger’s nerves and her uncertainty about Lee — she correctly reads that he’s probably trouble, but Lee is also quite charismatic — is something to behold.
“If you were to ask Ginger, ‘What would a show about your life be?,’ I think it would be all the opposite moments that you’re seeing,” Gilpin told THR. “I think she’d be like, ‘Oh, film me in the courtroom with my clients. Don’t show my house or my fridge or my love life.’ I think it’s sort of controlled mess for her, and The Lowdown is interested in lifting up the carpet and seeing what’s underneath every everyone’s mess.”
Her nervousness is justified: One of the men following her comes to her house at the end of episode one, and she shoots him (off camera) through her window. By the end of episode two, Lee has dived headlong into the case: He discovers one of Ginger’s followers is a prison guard named McMann (Shane McRae) and befriends a recently fired guard, Chili (Paul Schneider, playing a very different kind of guy than he did on Parks and Recreation), in an effort to get information on Mekko.
After an extended set of scenes between Lee and Chili that alternates between pathetic and unbearably tense, Chili claims he’s going to steal a few beers from a buddy’s house — then drives Lee to McMann’s. Lee manages to run away, but not before witnessing Chili’s murder by McMann.
Despite the very noir-ish events described above, The Lowdown is also downright funny in the first two episodes of season two. Series creator Sterlin Harjo directed both episodes and wrote the premiere (Sneha Koorse penned episode two), and he told THR that he and his fellow writers are always looking for comedy within the show.
“I think that if this feels funnier, it’s because I had more room,” Harjo told THR. “I was building a world in season one, and in this one, people already know the world, so I could really just hit the ground running, and that gave me the confidence to really go for it. I didn’t have to explain who Lee was or what he was doing. … I could really just lean into his life as we enter this moment. And I’m always looking for humor. I couldn’t do something that was not somewhat humorous, I don’t think.”