Forget ‘True Detective,’ FX’s 2-Part Crime Thriller Is the Perfect Replacement

While the season-length crime mystery has been a fixture of American television going back at least to David Lynch‘s Twin Peaks, it hit its peak in the early 2010s. In shows like Mare of Easttown, the format became a vehicle for character actors to get a three-dimensional spotlight, similar to the genre’s North Star, Season 1 of True Detective. But the show that has most effectively created that creative atmosphere in the 2020s is FX’s The Lowdown, a black comedy thriller set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which follows an eccentric “truthstorian” named Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke), who digs into strange historical mysteries with the zeal of a detective and the righteous heart of a journalist.

The Lowdown is fundamentally a story of corruption, modern-day exploitation, and the dangers of exposing the truth. It’s as exciting to watch as it is rambling and funny, trading the dark blues and grays of its genre forebears for the golden warmth of its setting. Lee is an undeniably heroic figure who also screws up plenty, coming off as a deadbeat whose obsession with his righteous aims and undeniable intelligence often conflict with his shaggy-dog ways. As a journalist of local infamy, he immediately attracts the bad attention of a white supremacist gang — and the mysterious death of the wealthy Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson) might also have something to do with it. Ultimately, The Lowdown is much bigger than Lee, and is all the better for it.

‘The Lowdown’ Has an Epic Sense of Scale

After creating the modern classic Reservation Dogs, Sterlin Harjo used The Lowdown to make something akin to the epic, morally compromised noir storytelling of films like Chinatown. Lee Raybon is a good face for the show, a detective straight out of Inherent Vice or The Long Goodbye, forced to navigate a conspiracy bigger than he could imagine. Characters like Marty (Keith David), Donald Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan, a canny throwback to another classic mystery show), and Lee’s ex-best friend Wendell (Peter Dinklage) all give the show some welcome texture.

The Washberg clan has its sights set on the governorship of Oklahoma, and Dale’s death is an inconvenience that could threaten to overthrow everything. Dale has hidden clues inside his collection of Jim Thompson novels (speaking of southwestern crime stories), but to navigate the full depths of the conspiracy, Lee must put himself at risk, emphasized when he’s kidnapped in the premiere by a neo-Nazi duo. Neither the rare bookselling business he operates by day nor the truth-telling he pens by night pays the bills — those things are done out of conviction. But in the tradition of the great noir films that inspired The Lowdown, money is the lifeblood of everything.

Four films, four completely different ways of handling money, trouble
and other people. This is the one you would survive, why it suits you, and what it would cost you to
be there.

You have quietly arranged your life so that very little can get
to you, and a surprising number of people find that infuriating. You would be completely at
home here.

• The Dude is the only person in the film with no ambition, and the only one who comes out
  the other side undamaged. That is not an accident.
• You do not chase things. You let situations arrive and you deal with them at your own
  pace, which is a genuine skill however lazy it looks.
• This is a full crime plot happening around a man who mostly wants his rug back, and that
  is exactly the energy you would bring to it.
• Everything goes wrong. You abide. The film ends.

You talk your way through life and it works far more often than
it should. Give you a bad situation and an audience and you will find a way out of both at
once.

• Everett never has a plan that survives contact with reality. He has something better,
  which is the ability to keep talking until a new one turns up.
• You are the optimist in the group, the one who makes a ridiculous idea sound reasonable
  at two in the morning.
• This is the warmest film the Coens have made. It is a chase, a comedy and a musical at
  once, and nobody in it is quite beyond saving.
• You would end up famous entirely by accident, and act like you planned it all along.

You would survive Fargo because you are the only kind of person
who does: patient, decent, and completely unimpressed by anybody trying to be clever.

• Marge Gunderson solves the whole case by being polite, thorough and unhurried while
  everybody around her panics. That is the entire argument of the film.
• You do the boring parts of the job, which is precisely why you would notice the thing
  everyone else walked straight past.
• Fargo is about ordinary greed causing enormous damage, and about one person who simply
  refuses to be corrupted by any of it.
• You would go home at the end of it, have dinner, and sleep perfectly well.

You do not expect the world to be fair and you stopped being
surprised about it a long time ago. That clear-eyed quality is exactly what this film asks
for.

• No Country is the Coens at their coldest: a film where being smart, fast and careful
  might still not be anywhere near enough.
• You plan for the worst, you keep your own counsel, and some part of you is already
  working out the exit.
• Llewelyn Moss is competent, prepared and resourceful, and the film is honest about
  whether any of that is ever sufficient.
• You would see it coming. Whether that helps is the one question the film refuses to
  answer.

At Its Best, ‘The Lowdown’ Is a Classic Noir Throwback

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• Image via FX Networks

Image via FX

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The Lowdown is very much a throwback to old-school pulp and noir stories, where money often complicates the simplest goals. Even its soundtrack and logo echo the experience of watching a ’70s movie like Shaft, where the private investigator is tasked with navigating a wildly complex web of deceit with his intuition and guts. Learning about Donald’s affair with Dale’s wife Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is just the tip of the iceberg. Dirty real estate deals, fistfights, shootouts, and threats from white supremacist gangs round the show out, giving it the edge of another modern Western crime show like Breaking Bad but with a much more likable protagonist.

While the Washberg mystery wraps up after the show’s first season, its ongoing Season 2 promises some new intriguing storytelling with a novelistic bent. Lee’s disaster of a personal life in the first season made him feel like The Wire‘s Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), who also wrestled his urge to screw up with a need to do the right thing. With Season 2, more of his family life rises to the top of the show’s narrative priorities, as Lee’s father, Lee Raybon, Sr. (Tommy Lee Jones), ambles into Tulsa. With an outspoken and often amoral hero like Lee and the innate mastery of pulp fiction in Harjo’s writing, The Lowdown has already proven itself a modern classic of crime television.