Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown debuted last night on FX. We jumped over to the office TV with our friends Stuart Hetherwood and Ryan McGahan to watch the pilot episode. You can stream the first episode here.
Matt Carney: What was your favorite gag from the first episode?
Z.B. Reeves: The Killer Mike scene was incredible, but I think my favorite cutaway was the security guard cousin playing video games as they kidnap Lee. That character’s intro, too, was hilarious: when the Hoot Owl Books cashier is like, “Oh, that’s my cousin, he’s great,” and it smash cuts to the cousin dancing outside. They’ve got a few of these perfectly stylized cuts in the episode.
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Stuart Hetherwood: I thought the best scene was when Lee goes to see the estate sale guy. He pays Lee $1500, they do the phone call, and he charges Lee $1500 right back. The cyclicality, the character development, the way they’re just dancing around one another. It’s all just one shot, basically. The writing was tight, it progressed the story forward, it solved multiple issues.
ZBR: That was a great scene. That actor is incredible.
Alicia Chesser: And I love seeing how well that character knows how to talk to the woman with the money.
SH: I just love that character—that sophisticated, gay, catty businessman. Like, I know that guy.
MC: Catty gay man of a certain generation is a very common type of guy in Oklahoma.
SH: And I like how he kind of disparaged the Tim Blake Nelson character for being a closeted gay.
SH: I thought the emotional scene between Lee and the daughter, where he’s saying “I bet dads and daughters have had this conversation thousands of times, and never once does the daughter want the dad to say, okay, I’m gone,” that was the heaviest emotional scene. And I thought for a new character like the daughter, it was really well-placed.
SH: That first Sweet Emily’s scene was way too long. And it just wasn’t very balanced.
Ryan McGahan: The episode in general was a lot of exposition. And I get that it’s a pilot, so you’re setting stuff up. But the pacing felt like it was at the same time frenetic and Okie-dokie slow.
ZBR: Ultimately it makes me want to watch the next one.
SH: I thought, overall, it’s fucking good, it’s funny, it’s got personality, you understand the character roles pretty intuitively, you want to see more of the Kyle MacLachlan and Jeanne Tripplehorn thing because they’re not in it too much too soon.
ZBR: That’s a good point; it sets up a lot without giving anything away.
SH: There’s room to grow! It strikes me as a really bingeable show.
MC: I interviewed Jeanne Tripplehorn last week, and she said that for a lot of Tulsans, this is going to become a comfort show because of the characters and the Tulsa textures. It’s all very familiar, the colors are warm.
SH: It’s the only show that I’ve seen at this scale that’s really captured Tulsa. I mean, it’s a little heavy-handed, a little overdone. Some of it is a lot overdone.
MC: We all groaned when Lee described himself as a “Truthstorian.”
AC: And the spaghetti western sting in that moment, oh my God.
ZBR: This is what I mean when I say that sometimes Harjo writes like he’s writing a trailer. It makes sense, it’s the pilot, but it seems like every few minutes he’s coming up to the viewer and saying, hey, do you remember that this is a new show, and I’m this guy, and he’s that guy? They’re making so many directorial and writing decisions that frustrate me, but they’re also really compelling me.
AC: I’ve watched this episode twice now, and both times through, I was super surprised at what a good time it was—what a good time I was having. And that’s not an experience that I’m used to having regarding Tulsa things. It’s fun! It’s fun to watch. And a huge part of that is Ethan Hawke, and his performance. Even though it is sometimes over the top.
ZBR: But sometimes it’s not.
AC: But sometimes it’s not! And when it’s not, it’s right on.
SH: I hope it’ll level out. From a critical perspective, I can see why it’s scored so high; it got an 89 on Metacritic, which is pretty damn high. It’s got all the elements. It’s got real-deal, A-list actors. That budget is ridiculous.
MC: The textures are an A plus plus plus plus.
AC: God, the sky, the way the sky looks in between the trees.
ZBR: The makeup job that they do on Hawke when he gets the shit beaten out of him; just tremendous.
MC: The characters are pretty good. I give them like a B plus. The story… I’m kind of in wait-and-see mode. I want to see it unfurl. It sets up a lot without committing to one particular direction.
AC: I find I didn’t care that much about the story in this episode. I’m much more interested in the characters and this Tulsa that’s collapsing the past and the present into each other. I’m fine with whatever happens in the story in a way.
ZBR: I think the story is aspirational enough. I think it’s taking a big enough swing narratively that if they do a good job with it, it’ll be a huge, cool story. Because Reservation Dogs was a very small, self-contained story.
AC: And it was about kids.
ZBR: Right, and he’s making the stakes so high here that I can’t help but be interested in what he does with such high stakes.
MC: Is it noir?
SH: They’re certainly calling it noir.
ZBR: It certainly aspires to noir and wants to be noir and tons of its references are noir.
SH: Right, like, it’s investigative! He’s connecting the dots on the wall!
AC: There’s a dark underbelly.
MC: It’s a very Tulsa noir. There are the neon lights coming from the gas station and the reflections in the puddles and QT cups everywhere.
ZBR: Right. And the cigarette is a vape pen.
AC: And the close-up of Jeanne Tripplehorn in the mirror.
SH: Saying, “he was a good man,” with her drink, over and over; god, that was good.
MC: And there’s an evil presence in noir, generally, and here it’s white. Like, white nationalists are the menacing villain right now.
AC: Lee, I think, says that his piece is about past corruption, but that the family continues to be corrupt. So there are these layers of bad guy that make it distinctively Tulsa noir, as opposed to just this single individual bad guy. He says he wants to “set up a flare, kick up some rocks, and see what the roaches do at night”—I loved that line.
ZBR: They do ask us to accept a lot of weird coincidences. You mentioned when we saw it, Alicia, how wild it is that the one book Lee picks out of the bookshelf is the one book that has the explanatory note explaining all the other notes in all the other books. Obviously it’s not impossible, but it’s so unlikely! My brain has to work overtime just to suspend the disbelief. And the white supremacist’s hat sitting perfectly in the front yard of the estate sale?
AC: Again though, is he consciously and intentionally playing with the genre, which does that kind of thing?
RM: That sort of thing is why I think it is a noir, because noir uses these almost hackneyed plot devices. They’re part of noir.
AC: Right, so the heavy-handedness and over-the-top-ness is intentional.
MC: I think Sterlin just really falls in love with his characters. He has so much tender feeling towards them and I’m interested to see how that plays out in the rest of the show: which characters avoid a fate that’s being set up for them or get a softer version of the consequences of their actions, and which ones don’t.
AC: The governor is a possibility. And obviously, there’s Lee, who makes us all ask: how hard is the hammer going to come down on him?
MC: I mean, he gets beat up.
ZBR: He gets the shit beaten out of him twice in the first episode. The bar is kind of high right now. And they keep threatening to go after his family, and the family’s emotional string keeps being pulled in other places in the narrative, so I have to assume that that’s where they’ll go next. That last scene with Keith David was interesting; I found it really surprising that Lee would want to kill the guy who just freed him from captivity.
AC: I think that’s another question that I have: it’s not really clear what Lee’s mental health is like. I feel like it’s an open question in this episode. Digging up the truth makes him a target but he’s also at risk in other ways. This is a guy who has the conspiracy wall in his room. He’s seeing dead people in his van.
MC: Right, he seems to have suffered an actually traumatic event, from getting stuffed in the back of this car and witnessing these murders. Maybe he wasn’t reliable to begin with!
ZBR: God, I hadn’t even considered that Lee might not be a reliable narrator.
AC: He’s always verging on paranoia. Is it justified? Yes. Is it unjustified? Yes. And now he’s pulled his child into this too, and piqued her interest in it!
ZBR: Hey, Daughter, we’re doing my journalism together. What could go wrong? I just keep getting the shit beaten out of me!
