'The Lowdown' Was So Good
Just an incredible piece of television.
I‘m not going to spoil The Lowdown for you here. There are too many people who haven’t seen the first season yet, the one that ended last night with an episode that featured everything from messy moral conundrums to racists getting comeuppance to Keith David high as a kite on bovine vagina relaxers. I would love to write about this show the way I used to write about, like, Game of Thrones or Succession, shows that so many people watched that I could just assume everyone saw them and proceed accordingly. I don’t think I can do that right now. I can’t risk it. I need to stay in salesman mode. Lord, this was an incredible season of television, and not just because Killer Mike showed up multiple times wearing an eyepatch that matched the pattern of his shirt. Although that was important enough for me to mention in the first paragraph.
The Lowdown, in brief, again: Ethan Hawke plays a dude named Lee Raybon, a kind of dirtbag journalist— he calls himself a “truthstorian,” which tells you pretty much what you need to know on that front — who gets his hooks into a story about the recently deceased brother of a man who is running for governor of Oklahoma. Things devolve quickly. There are homicides (plural), and shady land deals, and a slew of racists who are trying to make backroom deals to facilitate a power grab. It all looks like a murder mystery at first, and it is (kind of), but it slowly reveals itself to be so much more.
Creator Sterlin Harjo — the man who made Reservation Dogs, another show that mixed heartfelt moments with absurdist humor in a way that might as well have been designed to appeal to me, personally — has been out doing the interview rounds today, in part to break down a wonderful season of television and in part to bang the drum a little bit in the hopes of landing a second season. I have read them all and have the links for you below, but the part I want to highlight now comes from his chat with Variety. I think this put it all very nicely.
As much as I’m trying to tell a story about a person, I’m also trying to tell a story about what I love. I love books. I love movies. I love crime stories. I love the written word. I love being able to be tough and also literate. I love being around people who will fight to the last breath for what they believe in, but they also love poetry. Those things should not be separated from each other. Those things should be intertwined. I grew up in a period in the world when art did that. Art could be dangerous. Art could change things. We believed in it in a way that, I hope, we can still believe in it to this day. But I think that the show has a bit of nostalgia in it, because those ideas haven’t been celebrated a lot as of late. And I hope that that changes.
Please read that and don’t twist yourself into a knot over what your brain might try to construe as a high-minded statement about the role of art in current society. It is that, to be sure. But that’s a bigger conversation than I’m trying to have right now. I’m trying to tell you to watch The Lowdown, a show that believes deeply in literacy and the idea that people are complicated but also, and I think this is so important that I need to mention it again, dedicates a not-insignificant chunk of its first season finale to letting Keith David say silly things while high on medication used for bovine gynecology. There is a range on display here that can only be described as admirable.
It really was an incredible season of television, man. Just everything television can be, too — funny and sad, poignant and action-packed, with episodic detours that use the extra time to round out the characters in ways that become important later on (THE DINKLAGE EPISODE), all the things we mention when we wax nostalgic about shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos.
It helps that it fell into my favorite genre of storytelling: A Bozo Develops A Purpose. We’re in a great period for Bozos Developing Purposes lately. Between this and One Battle After Another — another story about an ideological burnout with a firecracker teenage daughter and a mission to make things difficult for a secretive group of wealthy racist assholes — you could make a pretty decent argument that the message the creative community is sending us right now is that the bozos are our only hope. As a bozo, I find this both thrilling and a little intimidating. I can’t be trusted to place my own sandwich order. I’ll just start clicking on things. Maybe that’s the point, actually.
I’m rambling now. I do that when I get excited about something. I hope I have convinced you to go back and watch this show if you didn’t start it yet. And I hope enough of us watch it and rabblerouse about it that it gets a second season. In two of the post-finale interviews I read, Harjo mentioned The Rockford Files while discussing his inspiration for where this could go. And here I thought I couldn’t go getting more wound up about all of this. But here we are, buddy. Play the song.
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STUFF I CLICKED ON
— Vulture let me write about Claude from Slow Horses, a stuffed-shirt bureaucrat who thinks he’s a gallant knight and who has never gotten anything right and who I kind of adore
— interesting piece on James Gunn and what his growing entertainment empire is trying to say
— I mentioned them above but just a slew of great interviews with Lowdown creator Sterlin Harjo: with Alison Herman in Variety, with Rick Porter in THR, and with Jenna Scherer at AV Club
— read the article about Thailand’s speed-eating contests with pet contestants if you want but definitely scroll through the pictures at least
— good show back soon
— The White Lotus is going to Paris
— Keanu is making a movie with sharks and a time loop
— you can tell I’m a sick person because I see headlines like “Kim Kardashian’s ‘All’s Fair’ Bashed With Zero-Star Review and More Horrendous Reactions: ‘This May Be the Worst TV Drama Ever’” and they actually make me more intrigued
— related, kinda: “Kim Kardashian blames ChatGPT for failing her law exams”
— apparently, according to the English translation of this Italian news story, the password for the Louvre’s video surveillance program was just “Louvre,” which everyone made fun of but could actually, in a way, be just stupid enough to work?
— Australian skull returned over 50 years after it was stolen
— Vin Diesel is doing incredible things on Instagram
INSTAGRAMM
Okay, that's it for this week. Please share and subscribe and make more shows where bozos wreck some racists.
