An old man in a gray suit is walking the shoulder of a country road outside Tulsa when a police car pulls up beside him. The first joke of the season is printed on his red trucker cap, which looks like a campaign hat from across the road and turns out to read “Psalms 107:29.” He tells the officer his name is Lee Raybon, and he seems not to know what year it is, which turns out to be the first con of a season built on them. The old man is Tommy Lee Jones, and “The Lowdown” came back to FX on Wednesday night, October 14th, with a two-episode premiere that hands Ethan Hawke’s Lee Raybon a new case, a new crush and the father he told his daughter was dead.
Sterlin Harjo, who co-created “Reservation Dogs” for the same network, wrote and directed “The Rupidoop,” then directed “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” from a script by Sneha Koorse. The season runs eight episodes, with new ones arriving every Wednesday on FX and Hulu, while Disney+ carries the show outside the U.S. The finale, “The Tower,” is listed for November 25th. Season 1 ended with Lee solving the death of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), a case that closed with the Washberg land handed back to the Osage Nation. The new season opens with Lee about to be honored for the story he wrote about it. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “The Lowdown” Season 2 episodes 1 and 2, including the killing at the end of “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.”
He tells the officer his name is Lee Raybon, and he seems not to know what year it is, which turns out to be the first con of a season built on them.”
The Lee we already know starts his day in bed with the woman he has been seeing, asking her, not quite seriously, to marry him, and she does not take the offer any more seriously than he made it. She reads his tarot instead. That night he is named Tulsa’s Citizen Journalist of the Year for the Washberg story, and he takes the stage high on mushrooms and turns the acceptance speech into a sermon about how everyone in the room is a sellout, with a shot at his absent father on the way. Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), his teenage daughter, leaves before he is done. Later in the evening a fellow journalist punches him in the face, which by this show’s standards counts as a review.
At the bar he meets Ginger (Betty Gilpin), a public defender who tells him two men have been following her all evening and then refuses to say what they look like, as if it were a test. Lee finds them in the men’s room, where they offer him candy, and one of them carries SS lightning bolts in ink. Ginger is not dazzled by the man of the hour, since the award-winning story reads to her like a puff piece, but she kisses him anyway on the way to her ride home, a performance staged for the men watching her. Lee, still high and badly misreading the gesture, takes it as the start of something.
He turns up at her office the next day, and she finally explains. A former client, Mekko Dean, is serving time at Boontill prison and used to talk with her regularly, then went silent. The way she talks about him suggests he was more than a client. Lee volunteers to visit, and the man who sits down across from him is not Mekko at all. That is the rupidoop of the title, a jailhouse switcheroo in which a stand-in inmate fields the questions. The running gag is that everyone in Tulsa except Lee seems to know the word. Lee, rattled, lets Ginger’s name slip to the impostor. On his way out, one of the men from the ceremony is waiting by his van with a quiet threat, and he turns out to be a guard named McMann (Shane McRae).
That night Lee goes to Ginger’s house and admits what he did, and she throws him out, because a prison crew that knows her name is a much bigger problem than the one she had that morning. He has barely pulled away when he hears shots and turns the van around. The second stalker, the lanky one, tried to get into her house, and Ginger put a bullet in him with her own pistol before he got away bleeding. The hour closes back at Hoot Owl Books, where police deliver the old man from the highway to the door, and the son who answers is not happy to see Lee Raybon Sr.
In “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound,” the old man is parked behind the bookstore counter eating from an oversized spoon and still playing confused, an act that collapses the moment his son leans on it. Jones explained the highway scene to The Hollywood Reporter as a con for transportation, and said, “He gets a ride precisely to his destination, which is his son’s doorstep.” Lee scolds his staff for feeding him and wants him out. The two have not seen each other in 17 years, and the father says he came because he read about the award, and the article mentioned a granddaughter.
He is a grifter by Lee’s account. Lee will not even tell him his granddaughter’s name. The old man ignores the order to leave, introduces himself around the block as Frog, and charms Waylon (Cody Lightning), Cousin Henry (Jude Barnett) and record store owner Abel (Josh Fadem) into telling him what Lee would not. By the afternoon he is waiting outside Francis’s school, and when he tells her he is her grandad, she tells him her grandfather is dead. That is the lie Lee told her, and now Francis knows it.
Lee keeps pushing on Ginger, borrowing a line from Cyrus (Killer Mike) that the guards are gangsters with laminated name cards, and she shuts him out of her own case. Her plan B is Pookie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a repeat offender headed for Boontill with a foot fetish, and she lets him suck her toes in exchange for his promise to look for Mekko on the inside. It is the strangest scene of the premiere, and Gilpin told TV Insider, “It was also my first day of work,” and added, “So that was my introduction to everybody.” Harjo told the same outlet he wanted Ginger to “shift this power and get what she needs from this person” without falling back on the usual interrogation room.
Lee, on his own now, goes back toward the prison. A gas station near the prison sells him a charity calendar of corrections officers in which McMann poses with a gun. He learns the guards drink at a strip club called Secrets, and there he finds Chili Franks (Paul Schneider), a guard who was recently fired. Lee pretends he wants to become a guard himself, and the act gets him invited home for cheeseburgers and beer. Somewhere in the evening Chili admits that McMann was the one who fired him.
That should have been the warning. Chili proposes a beer run, then drives Lee to McMann’s house instead, hoping to buy his job back with a nosy journalist. Lee bolts for the trees as McMann comes out firing, and McMann yells into the dark, asking where Mekko is. Then he turns his gun on Chili and kills him while Lee watches from the woods. Schneider, playing a long way from his “Parks and Recreation” years, makes Chili sad and dangerous at once, and his death lands hard.
McMann’s question is the real cliffhanger, because it suggests the guard who was stalking Ginger does not know where Mekko is either, and that turns a cover-up into something messier. It may also put a new light on Ginger, who shares less than she asks for. Harjo told Variety the premise started with one question: “How do you go missing from prison?” He also said the production shot this season inside the same McAlester prison where he visited his uncle as a kid.
The casting of Frog came straight out of the writing, since Harjo told Variety he thought of Jones right after finishing the first script, and that Jones signed on already loving the bookstore’s security guards, Waylon and Cousin Henry. “If you love the security guards, you love me and the show and the vibe,” Harjo said. Jones told TV Insider that “Lee Senior is on a mission to rejoin his family”, and the premiere plays that mission as both sincere and suspicious, which is probably the right call for a man whose first scene is a lie told to a cop.
Among the critics who saw the season early, two of the warmest reviews single out Gilpin. Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein ran his review under a plea for people to watch and wrote that “Gilpin makes the perfect femme fatale for the show’s loose riff on a noir,” and Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk argued that Gilpin moves the show out of “promising but uneven” territory. Collider called the season “positively spectacular.” Screen Rant is less won over, saying Season 2 “becomes thin and shallow” next to the first. On the evidence of these two hours the warm reviews seem closer to the mark. Screen Rant’s worry about pacing is still fair, since the Chili detour eats most of an episode, and it could matter more if the mystery keeps moving this slowly.
What Do You Think? If McMann does not know where Mekko Dean is, who moved him, and does Ginger know more than she is telling Lee? Is Frog really in Tulsa to meet his granddaughter, or is Francis the start of another con? With Chili dead and Lee the only witness, how long before McMann comes looking for him?
See you on the next binge!
