“The Lowdown,” Sterlin Harjo’s new collection, after co-creating the good “Reservation Dogs” with Taika Waititi, is a style train — a noir-nodding homicide thriller — a lot as Donald Glover adopted “Atlanta,” that present’s aesthetic cousin, with a spy collection, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.” On the face of it, this may appear a step backward. Although style dominates tv manufacturing virtually to the purpose of saturation, it could, in fact, be achieved poorly or effectively, could also be apparent or refined, stale or recent. The weather could also be acquainted, however there are solely six totally different items in chess, and the combos are infinite; “The Lowdown,” which premieres Tuesday on FX, wins the sport.
We’re as soon as once more in Oklahoma, off the rez and within the metropolis. Ethan Hawke performs Lee Raybon, launched on digital camera by a vape pen and a duct-taped boot. A used-book supplier and self-styled “truthstorian,” whose “true nature” is described by a good friend as “narcissistic cowboy with a penchant for seeming like the good guy,” Lee’s character was impressed by Tulsa citizen journalist Lee Roy Chapman, whose article “The Nightmare of Dreamland: Tate Brady and the Battle for Greenwood,” which uncovered the racist previous of a celebrated citizen, is represented right here by Lee’s comparable piece on the historical past of the regionally highly effective Washberg household. Of his investigative avocation, he says, “I read stuff, I research stuff, I drive around and I find stuff, then I write about stuff. Some people care, some people don’t. I’m chronically unemployed, always broke. Let’s just say that I am obsessed with the truth.”
Missing an abnormal sense of propriety, Lee attends an property sale at Dale’s in the hunt for books and finds a observe Dale had tucked into a replica of noir idol Jim Thompson’s “Texas by the Tail”; it factors to extra notes in different crime books, launching a thriller. On the identical time, Lee, who has a behavior of blithely poking at hornet’s nests and wandering into the lion’s den in the hunt for attention-grabbing bones — and pays the value many times — is trying into fats cat developer Frank Martin (Tulsa native Tracy Letts, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “August: Osage County”), asking him “why you’re buying up Black-owned businesses around Tulsa — that’s a little weird.” Martin’s statements recommend a coming battle with the Indigenous inhabitants, as he complains to his fellow white-haired white males, “These Indian tribes — they’re like foreign governments set up right here under our nose, beholden to no man and no laws except those of their own making.”
Jeanne Tripplehorn performs Betty Jo Washberg.
(Shane Brown / FX)
Not like many prolonged collection, which fill time with repetitious reversals of fortune, unproductive subplots and motion sequences, “The Lowdown,” like “Reservation Dogs,” makes use of that actual property to construct character and character relationships; it offers its folks time to speak. Prolonged encounters may occupy most of an episode, most notably one with Peter Dinklage as his bitter former companion within the bookshop; each actors make a meal of it.
There’s a plot right here. Solely 5 episodes out of eight have been out there for assessment, so I can’t say precisely the place it’s going, or if that ingredient of the collection will show worthwhile. However as in “Reservation Dogs,” plot is secondary to character, which in main and minor roles has been fantastically conceived and executed. (You may simply sit again and benefit from the folks with out worrying an excessive amount of the place any of it leads.) Hawke performs his bruised and battered growing old hero and not using a trace of vainness. An impeccable solid options the nice Keith David in a pleasant fats position as a poetical personal detective; Kaniehtiio Horn (the Deer Girl in “Reservation Dogs”) as Lee’s ex-wife, Samantha; Michael Hitchcock, a daily in Christopher Visitor movies, as vintage supplier Ray (there’s a bit little bit of “Lovejoy” on this collection as effectively); Siena East as Lee’s droll bookstore worker, Deidra; and Scott Shepherd as a type of blond bland sorts whose performative mildness spells hazard — together with myriad others whose comparatively restricted display time is sufficient to make a full-bodied impression. That’s what well-written dialogue and good casting can do.
Although the collection’ debt to noir fiction and movie is foregrounded — as when Marty takes a date to see Robert Sensible’s 1949 “The Set-Up” at an artwork home the place the marquee reads “Noir Nights. American Neorealism Series” — “The Lowdown” doesn’t itself fairly qualify as noir; it’s too cheeky. It’s definitely no Jim Thompson novel (which may be darkish to the purpose of perversity), however one thing extra akin to Hitchcock in a puckish temper or Robert Altman’s laid-back tackle Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” — or, for that matter, “The Rockford Files,” in that its protagonist will get labored over quite a bit, and the bruises present. (Although Jim Rockford’s hair stayed neat in a means that Lee’s refuses to.)
As in “Reservation Dogs,” place is essential and roots the motion, nonetheless extravagant, to the true world. (That present’s director of images, Mark Schwartzbard, is again at work right here, splitting episodes with Christopher Norr.) There are Tulsa-connected musicians on the soundtrack, and a restaurant the place many conversations, in a extremely conversational collection, happen, whose identify, Candy Emily’s, references a Leon Russell tune and Emily Smith, the lady it celebrates. There are lots of different nods to native tradition and historical past you’re definitely not anticipated to acknowledge — however can really feel cool for those who do. The vital factor is to observe.
