As “The Lowdown” Season 2 opens, citizen journalist (or “truthstorian”) Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) is in a completely uncomfortable position: success. He’s about accept a local media award for a piece he wrote about the death of Dale Washberg (as detailed in Season 1 of the series), but isn’t happy about it. Rather than accept his acclaim, a boozy Lee gets on stage and immediately tears into the crowd for being sellouts.
Series creator Sterlin Harjo admits to Variety that Lee’s inability to deal with a bit of acclaim comes directly from his own experience after the launch of his previous FX series, “Reservation Dogs.” “I was living in a studio loft in downtown Tulsa, and all of a sudden I had a TV show,” he says. But then, ‘Reservation Dogs’ Season 1 truly changed my whole life. And I didn’t handle it well at first.
You don’t know what to do. All of a sudden, there’s articles, and there’s all this stuff and you’re very exposed. It was fun thinking of that as Lee Raybon, because how does he handle the little recognition that he got?
I bet he handles it really wrong, and I bet that there is a knee-jerk reaction to reject it.” The theme of Season 2, Harjo says, is to figure out how to love yourself — and how that love will extend to everyone else in your life. After that initial shock of his “Reservation Dogs” success, Harjo is getting there. It helps that he has another critically acclaimed series on his hands.
Conceivably, “The Lowdown” could go on forever, given that there’s no shortage of story fodder about the amount of profligacy that exists in the world. After Season 1, “I wasn’t finished telling the story,” he says. This time out, Harjo says he was inspired by the 1972 Lee Marvin/Gene Hackman film “Prime Cut,” 1981’s “Cutter’s Way” and the 1949 noir “The Third Man” to come up with the underlying concept.
How do you go missing from prison? That was such an intriguing question.” Harjo says he, fellow exec producer Duffy Boudreau and Hawke began brainstorming the idea while doing their press tour for Season 1 of “The Lowdown.” “That’s when we came up with kind of the bones of the plot,” he says. Worth, who shared stories about her experiences.
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