‘THE LOWDOWN’ ON FX

FX’s new series “The Lowdown” wastes little time setting up the noir atmosphere of the dusty, hardscrabble landscape of Tulsa, Oklahoma, starting with the apparent suicide of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), the black sheep of a prominent local family.
  
Sitting at his desk, penning a mystery letter that will get tucked away inside a paperback book to be hidden on a shelf with several Jim Thompson crime novels, Dale ends up with a bullet hole at his right temple.
  
While the apparent suicide happens within the first minutes of the first episode, it won’t be the last time that Dale makes an appearance. 

One might question whether he is truly deceased, and if he is, then Ethan Hawkes’ Lee Raybon occasionally conjures up his spirit during another quest for truth.
  
What we have in creator, writer and director Sterlin Harjo’s (“Reservation Dogs”) gritty exploits of his central character’s search for veracity is a hunt across a trail of breadcrumbs through the underbelly as well as the upper echelon of the Sooner State’s second largest city.
  
Calling himself a “truthstorian,” citizen journalist Lee Raybon is also the purveyor of rare books at Hoot Owl Books, where his lone underpaid employee Deidra (Siena East) keeps her boss and everything at the store in line one eye-roll at a time.
  
Raybon’s curiosity with the death of Dale, which he suspects as something other than suicide, is that the Washberg family is well-heeled and powerful. Moreover, Dale’s brother Donald (Kyle MacLachlan “Twin Peaks”) is campaigning for governor.
  
Does that fact that Raybon has written an unmasking of the Washberg family having anything to do with Dale’s demise? Obviously, a family member running for office has reason enough to squash any skeletons escaping from the closet.
  
Donald Washberg is connected to unsavory characters, including Tracy Letts’s Frank Martin, owner of Akron Construction that is buying up distressed property all over town, and Allen Murphy (Scott Shepherd), who handles the dirty work for the construction company.
  
Persistent sleuthing has intruded on Raybon’s personal life, to where his ex-wife Samantha (Kaniehtiio Horn) is frustrated by his incessant stalking of corruption and deceit, even if she grudgingly admires his dedication and fears for his innate ability to place himself in danger.
  
What about Keith David’s Marty, a mysterious private investigator hired by the gubernatorial candidate to tail Raybon? Does he pose any threat? He keeps showing up at the same diner frequented by the citizen journalist. 
  
Violence comes for Raybon when a pair of skinheads break into his bookstore’s upstairs quarters and beat him to a pulp for what he wrote about them setting fire to a synagogue. What’s surprising is that these dimwits had enough brain cells to read a newspaper.  
  
However, Raybon is devoted to his wise 14-year-old daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who shares her father’s curiosity and adventurous spirit so much that she’s always eager to tag along on his escapades.
  
Despite being mostly a loner, Raybon has support from friends and colleagues, like the antique dealer Ray (Michael Hitchcock) who helps with clues, and Cyrus (Michael “Killer Mike” Render), editor of the crime newspaper “Tulsa Beat” who publishes some of his work.
  
Film noir is a popular genre that’s also had a storied history in television. Personal favorites on the small screen include the “Mr. Lucky” and “Peter Gunn” series when television was black-and-white, and thus all the better for authentically depicting the harsh noir atmosphere.
  
The interesting thing about noir over time, whether in film or television, is that the settings are typically in big cities like Los Angeles, in particular, or New York, Chicago, and even New Orleans, where crime rears its ugly head in the dodgy parts of a city.
  
During a press conference with television critics, Sterlin Harjo, who has called his show “Tulsa noir,” explained that the Oklahoma town has “the right amount of grit, the right amount of history, the right amount of secrets to set the story in,” to fight for the truth.
  
Ethan Hawke let it be known that he loved the expression “truthstorian” because “it’s not a really a word,” and furthermore, it expresses “the intersection of truth and history,” and then he finally admits it’s “also sloppy and kind of a trainwreck of an expression.”
  
The most fun part of “The Lowdown” is that just about everyone in Tulsa, with the possible exception of Raybon’s precocious daughter, is either a trainwreck or on the verge of becoming one. 
  
In the role of Dale Washberg’s widow Betty Jo, Jeanne Tripplehorn let it be known that her character may or may not have been a stripper, but she was “definitely a rodeo queen” and “kind of a hellcat.”
  
If anything, “The Lowdown,” in the fine tradition of noir with a touch of dark comedy, is deliciously character-driven, with so many of the players proving to be eccentric, none more so than Ethan Hawke’s Lee Raybon constantly engulfed in all sorts of problematic situations.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.