Why It Was Important to Beat the Sh*t Out of Ethan Hawke in ‘The Lowdown’

Sterlin Harjo’s first series, “Reservation Dogs,” does a lot of playing around with genre. It opens with an elevated (gas station) heist (for flamin’ flamers chips), after all. There are ghosts and spirits, horror episodes, trips back into the ‘70s, the odd touch of a Western. In his second show, FX’s “The Lowdown,” Harjo and his team are still delightfully elastic when it comes to moving from comedy to thriller to character drama and back again — sometimes within the same scene.

But “The Lowdown” unambiguously owes much more to film noir than any other genre. You need look no further than the fact that, like all great noir protagonists, Ethan Hawke’s Lee Raybon keeps getting the shit beat out of him.

Raybon is the owner of a Tulsa secondhand book store by day, self-appointed “truthstorian” by night, who investigates the hypocrisies and hidden secrets of Oklahoma’s…