You Guys Gotta Watch 'The Lowdown'
I am so excited about this show and I am going to yell about it now.
Reservation Dogs was one of my favorite shows of the last decade or so. One of my favorite shows ever, actually. Smart and stupid, heartfelt and childish, whimsical and deeply real, it really just had everything I’ve ever wanted out of television. I wrote about the show when it ended a couple of years (and... jobs) ago and stand by all of it today. That’s why, when I saw the show’s creator, Sterlin Harjo, had a new show coming out this fall, I filed the information away in a little folder in my brain titled “COOL SHIT TO BE EXCITED ABOUT.” And in that folder it stayed, until I watched the screeners for the show last week, at which point I clicked on the file and dragged it into a little folder in my brain titled “COOL SHIT TO YELL AT EVERYONE ABOUT.”
And so, here we are, with me starting to yell at you about watching The Lowdown, which premieres tonight on FX and streams on Hulu after it airs. God, I love this show. It’s so much fun.
The plot, without giving too much away, goes like this: Ethan Hawke plays a dirtbag writer and journalist in Tulsa who calls himself a “truthstorian.” He’s a guy who is a big conspiracy-addled pain in the ass but is also very charming. Not a guy I’d want to know personally but I guy I very much enjoy watching on television. He gets his hooks into a story involving skinheads and murder and powerful rich people and a shady building development. He gets beaten up a lot. Kyle MacLachlan plays a big dope rich guy who is running for office. Jeanne Tripplehorn plays a rich lady whose husband committed suicide and doesn’t seem too broken up about it. Keith David — fresh off being cool as hell on Duster — shows up as some mysterious dude who follows Ethan’s character around a lot. Killer Mike is in there as the editor of a salacious local paper that runs Ethan’s articles next to pictures of half-naked women. His character wears an eyepatch. The eyepatch always matches his shirt. I feel like an image will drive this one home.
It’s been a while since I’ve been this excited about a show. I’ve liked other shows recently, for sure. Always Sunny has remained improbably great about 200 years into its run. Peacemaker is a chaotic blast. The Righteous Gemstones went out in a blaze of glory. Murderbot made me cry. Poker Face let Patti Harrison go insane. The Jason Mantzoukas experience on Taskmaster was the most pure fun I’ve had watching… anything this year. I like TV a lot and there’s a lot of it out there that’s still really good.
This one is a little different, though. This one is kind of thrilling. It’s loose and messy and still plotted so tightly that the episodes are zipping by. Everyone on the show is at least a little shady and crooked. A lot of them are also pretty stupid. The teenagers on the show are all smarter than the adults and are little wiseasses about it. The stakes keep getting higher as new information is revealed. It’s a little like The Nice Guys like that, with bumbling idiots getting in over their heads and hanging on by their fingernails as the story shoots and twists them along. I don’t have many higher compliments to give than that.
So, yes. Watch The Lowdown. I really like this one so far. If you like the kinds of things I like, I suspect you’ll like it, too.
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STUFF I CLICKED ON
— I was on the Phys Ed podcast (subscribers only) to chat about everything from the time I beaned the same kid twice in one inning as a high school pitcher to all the weird ways sportsbrain still pops up in my life since my spinal cord injury
— lots of Kimmel stuff, holy Toledo, starting with Brian Phillips taking out a chainsaw after the suspension was announced and ending (???) with this piece by Josef Adalian on the reinstatement
— Scott Tobias wrote a banger about Seven
— Kelsey McKinney blogged about The Rapture, which is happening either today or tomorrow depending on which TikTok loons you choose to believe
— rules are rules, if we mention The Rapture, I post the trampoline scene from The Leftovers, maybe the best television show I’ve ever seen
— shoutout Marilyn Hagerty, whose Olive Garden review went viral many years ago and who was like an anti-cynicism bomb the internet both needed and still needs
— Sylvester Stallone wants to use AI to play a teenage version of Rambo, which is both maybe the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and something I would absolutely watch
— legit lol at the rundown of Zuckerberg trying to get his stupid fancy glasses to work
— “LimeWire acquires Fyre Festival, asking ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’”
— “Emotional support alligator is no longer welcome in Pennsylvania Walmart”
— “Fleeing driver jumps gap in University Bridge, evades police”
— you can’t tease me with a headline like “M&Ms spill across N.J. highway after tractor-trailer crash” and tell me the M&Ms all stayed in their packages
— I’ll watch this movie but there’s still no way I’m calling Baby Yoda “Grogu”
Okay, that's it for this week. Please share and subscribe and watch the shows I tell you to watch.
