A man in a suit walks out of a wet alley at night, past a parked car and a single streetlight, while a voice over the music says, “Tulsa, it’s a city that’s short on forgiveness.” A beat later, after a bar full of blue neon and a glass of ice, the same voice finishes the thought, “And long on punishment.” That is how FX opens the first trailer for the second season of “The Lowdown,” which the network released on Wednesday, September 30th. The new season premieres Wednesday, October 14th, on FX and Hulu, with Disney+ carrying it internationally. The trailer makes clear that Lee Raybon has not learned a single thing about staying out of trouble.
IndieWire reports that the season opens with two episodes at 9 p.m. ET and 6 p.m. PT, and Deadline says the eight-episode run then drops weekly on Wednesdays through late November. Ethan Hawke is back as Lee, the self-styled Tulsa “truthstorian,” and creator Sterlin Harjo has added two heavyweight names around him. Tommy Lee Jones plays Lee’s estranged grifter father, and Betty Gilpin plays a public defender who has no patience for Lee’s charm but agrees to let him help on a case. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the trailer and for the ending of the first season.
Tommy Lee Jones plays Lee’s estranged grifter father, and Betty Gilpin plays a public defender who has no patience for Lee’s charm but agrees to let him help on a case.”
Jones’s character is Lee Raybon Senior, and per Deadline’s synopsis, he arrives in town unexpectedly, which is a problem because Lee has always told his daughter Francis that her grandfather was dead. The trailer stages the reunion with a joke. A man in a gray jacket and a red cap walks alone down an empty two-lane highway through farm country. Then, outside a building at night with police lights flashing, someone tells Lee, “We found him wandering the highway. He says he’s your daddy.” Deadline flagged the casting as Jones’s first scripted television role in nearly four decades, and FX’s own trailer description bills him as an Academy Award winner.
The trailer does not linger on the father and son, but it gives them one sharp exchange, cut across close-ups of Hawke in front of a shop window and Jones in a cluttered room full of books. “What are you doing here? You can’t come in here and wreck everything,” one of them says, and the answer comes back, “Or what? You gonna call the cops again?” Later the two sit across from each other in a booth, Jones in a pale shirt and Hawke leaning in, and the cut does not say who has the upper hand. Given that the character is described as a grifter, Lee will likely spend the season unsure whether his father is helping him or working him.
Gilpin’s character is Ginger, whom Deadline describes as a “beautiful and brash public defender” and “herself a crusader for truth,” as well as “uncommonly immune” to Lee’s charms. Their meeting comes out of the end of last season. Lee’s exposé on Dale Washberg’s life and death wins him a local citizen-journalist award, he self-medicates, and his drunken, unfiltered acceptance speech is what catches Ginger’s attention. In the trailer, the two sit close together in a dark bar, she calls him “Mr. Investigator” and tells him, “There are two men here tonight following me. Can you spot them?” When he asks what they look like, she refuses to tell him, which is probably a test he is about to fail.
The case itself is a missing person, and according to Deadline, one of Ginger’s clients has gone missing from the state penitentiary. The trailer pitches the stakes in what sounds like Lee’s own excitable voice: “I’m telling you, this story is so hot, it’s on fire. It involves two confirmed murders and the whole Sheriff’s Department. It goes all the way to the top.” When someone asks if he is going to take them down, he answers, “Hell yeah, I’m gonna take them down!” The images that run under all of this include a uniformed sheriff walking through tall grass beside a patrol car, a man aiming a pistol beside a pickup truck, and an empty bowling lane.
IndieWire’s Christian Zilko writes that the trailer “promises another twisty saga of hidden corruption in the Great Plains,” and the editing leans into the noir without losing the comedy that made the first season stand out. A white van sits parked at a downtown corner under a street sign reading Boston, while one voice offers, “Good guy to the rescue,” and another fires back, “Good guy in a white van? It would be history’s first.” Someone else remarks that “the conspiracy theorist rides again.” Near the end, a voice shouts, “I shot someone!” in a living room scene, another answers, “Oh, women love that.” The trailer closes with Lee in sunglasses on a rooftop, pointing in both directions at once, under the promise, “You have not seen the best of Lee Raybon.”
The returning cast fills in the rest of Lee’s world, and most of them have new positions this year. Keith David’s Marty Brunner, who turns up behind a desk in the trailer, has been promoted to managing editor of The Heartland Press, “much to Lee’s chagrin,” according to Deadline. Rafael Casal is back as Johnny, “a jujitsu-trained dentist with a heart of gold,” who is now married to Lee’s ex-wife Samantha, played by Kaniehtiio Horn. Ryan Kiera Armstrong returns as Francis, who “longs for more time with her ever-busy father,” and the trailer gives the two of them a diner booth scene that plays over the lines, “Sometimes you just gotta blow things up. Be normal now and again.”
Harjo created the show and writes, directs and executive produces it, and he is best known as the co-creator of “Reservation Dogs,” which ran on FX from 2021 to 2023. He has confirmed that the two series share a fictional universe, and the first season made the link visible with cameos from Paulina Alexis and Devery Jacobs, while Hawke and Horn each played different characters on both shows. Lee himself is loosely inspired by the historian Lee Roy Chapman. Speaking on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, Harjo explained the casting this way: “You gotta get beat up, and Ethan’s really good at it,” adding that “it doesn’t feel like you can’t reach out and touch Ethan Hawke, and that’s what you need in a noir.”
The first season ended with Lee getting most of what he wanted, which is rare for a noir hero. He proved that Frank Martin, head of Akron Construction, conspired with Dale’s widow Betty Jo Washberg to pressure Dale into a land sale, and that the hired muscle sent to intimidate Dale killed him instead, with Betty Jo staging it as a suicide. Dale’s brother Donald publicly rejected the white supremacist coalition and honored Dale’s wish to give the disputed land to the street artist Chutto, who signed it over to the Osage Nation. Donald then won the governor’s race. Frank was shot dead by Bonnie, the mother of one of the killers, and the season closed at Samantha’s wedding, with Francis telling her father he is “a good man.”
Critics were almost unanimous about it. The first season holds a 98 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 59 reviews and an 85 on Metacritic. The American Film Institute named it one of the top ten television programs of 2025, and Hawke earned a nomination for Best Lead Performance in a New Scripted Series at the 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards. IndieWire’s Ben Travers wrote in his review that Lee may be a “bullheaded, behatted hero,” but “he’s also just a guy. A writer. A citizen. A father.” He called the show “a crowd-pleaser and weirdo’s delight all at once,” and the new trailer suggests nobody involved has any interest in sanding off either half of that.
The audience numbers tell a split story, and they explain the release plan. On linear FX, the first season peaked at 303,000 total viewers and mostly ran between 166,000 and 303,000, modest figures for a basic cable drama. On streaming it was a different show, with Samba TV reporting 719,000 U.S. households watching in the first six days on Hulu, and FlixPatrol placing it in the Disney+ top ten in 18 European countries around the turn of the year. FX renewed the series in January, and it is hard to read the joint FX and Hulu launch as anything other than a nod to where that audience lives.
A few other details have surfaced ahead of the premiere. Austin Amelio, best known for “The Walking Dead,” joins the season in a recurring role, according to a Deadline casting report, though the trailer does not single him out. Episode listings from The Futon Critic give the premiere episodes as “The Rupidoop” and “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound,” with the season finale titled “The Tower.” Whether two seasons of Tulsa conspiracies can keep the same freshness might be the real question for Harjo, but with Jones and Gilpin added to a cast that already worked this well, the odds look good.
What Do You Think? Is Tommy Lee Jones the right choice to play Lee Raybon’s grifter father? Will Betty Gilpin’s Ginger be the one person in Tulsa who can keep Lee in line? And can a second season of “The Lowdown” match the first?
See you on the next binge!
