As “The Lowdown” Season 2 opens, citizen journalist (or “truthstorian”) Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) is in a completely uncomfortable position: success. He’s about accept a local media award for a piece he wrote about the death of Dale Washberg (as detailed in Season 1 of the series), but isn’t happy about it.
Rather than accept his acclaim, a boozy Lee gets on stage and immediately tears into the crowd for being sellouts. It doesn’t go well. Series creator Sterlin Harjo admits to Variety that Lee’s inability to deal with a bit of acclaim comes directly from his own experience after the launch of his previous FX series, “Reservation Dogs.”
“I was living in a studio loft in downtown Tulsa, and all of a sudden I had a TV show,” he says. “I had been a kind of quiet independent filmmaker hoping to get some attention from anyone in this industry with my films. But then, ‘Reservation Dogs’ Season 1 truly changed my whole life. And I didn’t handle it well at first. You don’t know what to do. All of a sudden, there’s articles, and there’s all this stuff and you’re very exposed. It was fun thinking of that as Lee Raybon, because how does he handle the little recognition that he got? I bet he handles it really wrong, and I bet that there is a knee-jerk reaction to reject it.”
The theme of Season 2, Harjo says, is to figure out how to love yourself — and how that love will extend to everyone else in your life. After that initial shock of his “Reservation Dogs” success, Harjo is getting there. It helps that he has another critically acclaimed series on his hands.
Conceivably, “The Lowdown” could go on forever, given that there’s no shortage of story fodder about the amount of profligacy that exists in the world. After Season 1, “I wasn’t finished telling the story,” he says. “There was more of the corruption that I could tell.”
As Season 2 premieres on Oct. 14 on FX, Lee is soon recruited by public defender Ginger (Betty Gilpin) to investigate a new mystery: the disappearance of her client inside the Oklahoma prison system.
This time out, Harjo says he was inspired by the 1972 Lee Marvin/Gene Hackman film “Prime Cut,” 1981’s “Cutter’s Way” and the 1949 noir “The Third Man” to come up with the underlying concept.
“This idea of a missing man, I was like, how do we amp this up a little bit?” he says. “Well, it’s really hard to go missing in prison. There’s a sign-in sheet. How do you go missing from prison? That was such an intriguing question.”
Harjo says he, fellow exec producer Duffy Boudreau and Hawke began brainstorming the idea while doing their press tour for Season 1 of “The Lowdown.”
“That’s when we came up with kind of the bones of the plot,” he says. “Through lots of influences, and also just Oklahoma.”
Harjo says they also got to know Hawke’s cousin, a public defender in Ft. Worth, who shared stories about her experiences. “And I grew up in a town with a prison, and I saw how that affects a town,” he adds. “You really saw this shift in the town, and not a positive one. Because you have drugs, you have trafficking, you have drug trafficking of guards and prisoners.”
For inspiration, Harjo also remembers visiting his uncle as a kid in a McAlester, Oklahoma, prison, where he was doing time for repeat alcohol offenses. “The Lowdown” wound up shooting in that very same institution this season.
But that’s just one half of Season 2. The show’s other bombshell comes at the end of the opening episode: Tommy Lee Jones shows up as Lee’s estranged father.
“We talked a lot about being a father in Season 1. What’s it like being a son? And how do you forgive your father or a parent?” Harjo says. But just as Lee Sr. neglected his son growing up, Lee Jr. continues to mess things up with his own daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong).
“He’s trying to not make bad decisions [like his father],” Harjo says. “And at the same time, he’s neglecting his daughter, which is a bad decision. And then, his father, who was a bad father, is connecting with his granddaughter.”
“The more complicated you can make all that stuff, the better, because you’ve got to fight your way out of it as a writer,” Harjo says. “It was a very painful writing experience, more painful than anything, because I had written myself into so many corners. There was stuff that I was writing, there was episodes being written deep into production. I hope I never have to do that again!”
After writing the first episode of Season 2, Harjo immediately thought of Jones for the part as Lee’s father. Both he and Jones are both represented by CAA — and once Jones read it, the actor wanted in. Jones had already watched Season 1 — and told Harjo that he specifically loved the bookstore security guards Waylon (Cody Lightning) and Cousin Henry (Jude Barnett), who provide some comic relief.
“He wanted to be with them, which that told me everything I needed to know,” Harjo says. “If you love the security guards, you love me and the show and the vibe. Because those characters wouldn’t necessarily be on a lot of shows. You would cut that. After the premiere the other day, [Jones] says, ‘Thanks for paying attention to the character Waylon, because most people wouldn’t. It’s characters and storylines like that I think make the show what it is.’”
Harjo also excitedly notes that Jones started watching “Reservation Dogs” while shooting “The Lowdown.”
“There was something amazing about every day coming to work and having Tommy Lee Jones describe an episode of the show that I created,” he says. “He’d be talking to Ethan or me about it, and it was nice that he appreciated it so much. ‘Reservation Dogs’ is the type of show that you might think someone like Tommy Lee Jones could miss and not get it, but he’s a sophisticated, really smart artist and he loved it. It was amazing every day.”
As for the character of Ginger, she’s clearly a love interest for Lee — a tough character who can go toe-to-toe with him, but has a humor to her as well. Once Gilpin came on board, Harjo says she helped redefine who Ginger could be.
“Lee can be a bit wild, and I needed someone to match that energy,” Harjo says. “Betty can do anything, and I already knew that she was great. And then she came, and it was like another level. All of a sudden she’s doing things in the first scene that I’m filming with her, and there’s things happening that I did not write. From that day forward, I’m trying to write toward her voice and what she’s bringing to that character.”
Harjo says he aimed to make Season 2 “go harder and faster with everything that we have established. It’s kind of like ‘Reservation Dog’ Season 2 as well. I’ve established the world. I feel like people that like the show will come with me. I have a meter of what feels real and what doesn’t, so I always sort of adhere to that. Let’s make ‘Empire Strikes Back,’ where it’s great and it stands on its own, but you also want more by the end. Gods of TV willing, we’ll be making a Season 3 of this show.”
The first two episodes of “The Lowdown” Season 2 premiere on FX and Hulu on Oct. 14 at 9 p.m. ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Wednesdays