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In prestige mystery series these days, women tend to be on the case. When I think of the detectives or private investigators or nosy reporters of the past decade of TV, I mostly think of the supercompetent female lead, digging into a hometown mystery. Perhaps she\u2019s got pressing and complicated personal problems, perhaps she\u2019s a little too close to the case, perhaps she\u2019s wearing a parka. Either way, she\u2019s not happy. There\u2019s Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown,<\/em> Jodie Foster and Kali Reis in True Detective: Night Country<\/a>, <\/em>Amy Adams in Sharp Objects, <\/em>Regina King in Watchmen,<\/em> Cush Jumbo in Criminal Record,<\/em> Tamara Lawrance in Get Millie Black,<\/em> Rebecca Ferguson in Silo,<\/em> Emma Corrin in Murder at the End of the World,<\/em> Amanda Seyfried in Long Bright River, <\/em>Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone in Under the Bridge,<\/em> Elisabeth Moss in at least three different shows, and on and on. Steely eyed and lethal in their pursuit of truth, these women are figuring it out.<\/p>\n The Lowdown,<\/em> a Tulsa-based neo-noir from Sterlin Harjo, the creator of Reservation Dogs<\/a>,<\/em> features a familiar, but increasingly rare, type of investigator. Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) is more bleary than steely eyed in his pursuit of the truth, less lethal and more loquacious. Whereas the women detectives habitually wrestle with the line between personal and professional, Lee Raybon is simply not a professional in the first place. A rare book dealer and writer, Raybon calls himself a \u201ctruthstorian.\u201d What that means is that he\u2019s a conspiracy theorist whose conspiracies happen to usually be true. When we meet him, he\u2019s just published a long-form, deep-dive, archivally sourced takedown of the Washberg family, a dynasty of Tulsa power brokers with plenty of skeletons and maybe even white hoods in their closets. An anti-racist, anti-capitalist gadfly, he styles himself as a little more and a little less than a journalist.<\/p>\n Indeed, his investigative procedure is largely based on annoying his subjects until they confess their crimes. His Tulsa is diverse, dangerous, and teeming with life. Every street scene feels deeply specific, every storefront has a real person inside it. In one scene, a country band is playing outside an antiques mall, and the camera just hangs around for a minute to watch them play. Harjo has described<\/a> the show as a \u201clove letter to Tulsa,\u201d but Raybon is its messy messenger. You may want to shoot him.<\/p>\n Much of your experience of the show will likely hinge on whether you find Ethan Hawke irreplaceable or irritating. For much of the 1990s, Hawke created characters in the space between magnetism and repulsion. In films like Reality Bites, Before Sunset,<\/em> and even Hamlet,<\/em> he perfected portraits of men whose gargantuan self-regard gave way to toxic charisma. An icon of Gen X performative nonconformity, Hawke knows how to stylishly wear a red flag. As he has aged, Hawke has wielded this swaggering self-righteousness in a striking variety of ways: as tragedy in First Reformed,<\/em> as comic heroism in The Good Lord Bird,<\/em> and now as wily integrity in The Lowdown.<\/em> A man once said\u2014in The Big Lebowski,<\/em> a film that\u2019s clearly influenced<\/a> Harjo\u2019s work here\u2014\u201cyou\u2019re not wrong \u2026 you\u2019re just an ass\u00adhole,\u201d and that right there is the dramatic dilemma of The<\/em> Lowdown.<\/em> Can the quest for truth, in 2025, survive the cringiness of its most loyal servants? Can the wrong guy finally do the right thing?<\/p>\n The Lowdown<\/em> is a thoughtful, shambling neo-noir that\u2019s only occasionally, itself, a shambles. And, as in any great noir, the plot doesn\u2019t really make all that much sense. At the beginning of the series, we meet Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), the black sheep of a large family that has been pulling the levers of power in Oklahoma for generations. He sits alone in his dark study and narrates a suicide note about the corruption of the Washberg clan (also possibly: klan) before putting a gun to his temple and blowing his brains out. That note, which Washberg has written out in serial installments and distributed among a set of first-edition paperback novels written by the Oklahoman pulp-fiction pioneer<\/a> Jim Thompson, falls into Raybon\u2019s hands, and we\u2019re off to the races. Raybon believes Washberg was not responsible for his own death, and he\u2019s determined to find out first, how that could possibly be true, and second, whodunit.<\/p>\n What unfolds from there is a kind of slurry of Chinatown, The Long Goodbye,<\/em> and The Big Lebowski, <\/em>a revision of revisionist film noirs. And Raybon himself is an appealingly aggravating mash-up of Jack Nicholson\u2019s rakish charm, Elliott Gould\u2019s jazzed-out ambivalence, and Jeff Bridges\u2019s disarming dunderheadedness. His insatiable need to unravel conspiracy\u2014or maybe just to go where he\u2019s been told not to\u2014leads possibly to the truth at the rotten core of present-day Tulsa but possibly also nowhere in particular.<\/p>\n As a result, the show\u2019s plot manifests less as a precision-crafted narrative mechanism and more as a collection of characters, each of whom represents some visible facet of a much larger, unseen malevolence. There\u2019s Donald Washberg (a slithery Kyle MacLachlan), Dale\u2019s brother, who is both running for governor of Oklahoma and sleeping with Dale\u2019s widow, Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn). There\u2019s Allen Murphy (Scott Shepherd), an executive at a villainous-seeming corporation, who wears a fleece vest, speaks in threatening euphemisms, and keeps a pair of skinhead goons on retainer. And there\u2019s Marty (Keith David), the private eye who\u2019s both working for his old friend Donald and trying to keep Raybon out of trouble. All of these figures are connected, though to what end is unclear.<\/p>\n As Raybon tries to figure all that out, he takes us on a picaresque tour of Tulsa. We encounter not one but two independently owned local periodicals that can miraculously afford to pay freelancers; vicious rival antiques dealers; a witch who lives on a houseboat; a cabal of fishermen who run a lucrative caviar fraud operation; and an ever-expanding network of people who, at some point or another, all served time in prison. Just as on Reservation Dogs<\/a>,<\/em> the vast ensemble cast features characters with overlapping identities and social positions, but none of them are made to represent any universal experience. They\u2019re just Lee Raybon\u2019s neighbors.<\/p>\n Despite that broadly textured landscape, Raybon remains the show\u2019s center\u2014its most compelling and meaningful mystery. It\u2019s hard to tell, for instance, if Raybon\u2019s obsession with the truth is a virtue or a vice. He frames his quest in conspicuously heroic terms, but his recklessness causes trouble for nearly everyone around him. When he finds a big pile of drug money left unattended, he snags it without thinking and then proceeds to distribute it, like Robin Hood, to friends, debtors, and needy strangers. He might be putting them in danger, too; he might be simply recognizing that everyone in Tulsa is always already in danger; or he might be drastically underestimating the degree to which his privilege insulates him from the kind of risk that might ruin someone else. So, while the corruption he seeks to root out is undoubtedly real, this White Hat\u2019s white hat is a little dirty from overuse.<\/p>\n The place where this really resonates is in Raybon\u2019s relationship with his teenage daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who lives with Raybon\u2019s ex. The two make a cute buddy cop team, the inquisitive and impressionable young kid and the gruff, cuddly mentor, teaching her the weird ways of the truthstorian. But, on the other hand, the line between education and exploitation is sometimes too thin to see. When Raybon drags Francis along on his misadventures, are we watching wholesome father-daughter high jinks or a dad who can\u2019t stop thinking about himself long enough to spend quality time with his own daughter? Does he take her seriously enough to deal her into his obsessions, or is she only interesting to him if she\u2019s interested in his kooky nonsense?<\/p>\n At one point, abandoned by her father (who\u2019s actually been kidnapped for the second time in two days), Francis goes to talk with one of the feuding antiques dealers. Francis says that Raybon loves Jim Thompson novels, to which the antiques dealer replies, \u201cMust be a deadbeat.\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s a good dad,\u201d Francis returns, \u201cor he tries to be.\u201d They sit and share a cup of tea as Francis continues to explain and defend her dad\u2019s actions that day. At the end, she sighs. \u201cIt sounds kinda bad when I say it out loud,\u201d she says. \u201cIt does,\u201d the antiques dealer says.<\/p>\n When Harjo\u2019s Reservation Dogs<\/em> premiered in 2021, it came along at the tail end of what had been the Anti-Hero Age of American television. Seemingly every series was concerned with the moral ambiguity and complicated depth of feeling to be found in bad guys. Rez Dogs<\/em> was refreshing for lots of reasons\u2014its extraordinary cast of young Indigenous actors, its frank and bracing spirituality, its lack of investment in plot, its willingness to go off on tangents. But one of the main reasons it felt so new was that, for once, it was a show that didn\u2019t care about the interiority of evil men or the ethical trade-offs of powerful women. The protagonists of Rez Dogs<\/em> were just regular people.<\/p>\n