Great characters, great music, great costumes, and a murder. Those are the ingredients for a great TV series, and Oklahoma whodunnit The Lowdown has it all.
Starring Ethan Hawke, this FX comedy-drama series is one of the best series of 2025, and is available to stream on Disney Plus. It was dreamed up by Sterlin Harjo, who created the bittersweet coming-of-age comedy series Reservation Dogs – also on Disney Plus and also very much worth seeking out.
Hawke plays idealistic but extremely messy journalist Lee Raybon, who can't help dredging up the secrets and lies buried beneath his beloved home of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He likes crime novels and country music, but what he really loves is snooping into the affairs of the wealthy. When a politician's brother dies in strange circumstances, Lee is drawn into a web of corruption and violence that stretches from the street to the corridors of power.
Shady land deals, femmes fatales, a dogged gumshoe – The Lowdown has all the ingredients of a noir thriller. But it's looser than it sounds, staggering after Lee on various tangents, some relevant, some not.
Hawke's character is an outspoken bookseller who frequently makes reference to crime writer Jim Thompson, author ofThe Getaway and The Grifters, but The Lowdown doesn't really fit Thompson's cynical, amoral tone. The shaggy storytelling and quirky characters are more like a cocktail of Elmore Leonard, early Coen Brothers movies and Robert Altman’s 1973 detective flick The Long Goodbye.
What gives it that extra flavour is that the whodunnit plot is marinated in a smoky country and western seasoning, from Lee's pretty much ever-present cattleman hat to some hard-drinking cowboy romance. That combination of old-fashioned detective mystery and modern-day western is what makes The Lowdown such a fun series to spend time with.
Most of all, the characters of The Lowdown are great company, from Lee to the various interesting faces he encounters. Kyle MacLachlan, Tim Blake Nelson, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Keith David are among the oddball characters surrounding Lee, by turns times inspired and exasperated by his free wheeling self-righteousness.
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The cast is rounded out with interesting casting choices like Oklahoma playwright Tracy Letts, rapper Killer Mike, director Tom McCarthy and musician Mato Wayuhi, who did the music for Reservation Dogs. The late Graham Greene plays an affecting and pivotal role, while Peter Dinklage steals an episode with a raucous cameo as Lee's cantankerous former partner.
The Lowdown is a bittersweet treat, a fuzzy crime story with a whole lot of heart. Careful, though - you will find yourself wondering if you can pull off a cowboy hat.
Alastair is What Hi-Fi?’s editor in chief. He has well over a decade’s experience as a journalist working in both B2C and B2B press. During this time he’s covered everything from the launch of the first Amazon Echo to government cyber security policy. Prior to joining What Hi-Fi? he served as Trusted Reviews’ editor-in-chief. Outside of tech, he has a Masters from King’s College London in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion, is an enthusiastic, but untalented, guitar player and runs a webcomic in his spare time.
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