The Lowdown Season 1, Episode 1 Review – “Pilot”

Built from the familiar archetypes of westerns and neo-noirs, there are lot of beats in the first hour of Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown that will be recognizable, and even predictable. But while the instruments and sounds of The Lowdown‘s pilot episode are discernable to even a casual viewer of crime dramas, how it is composed and arranged easily makes it one of the best, most engrossing pilots of 2025, led by a mesmerizing lead performance from Ethan Hawke (in a fitting follow-up to his performance in 2020’s The Good Lord Bird miniseries, with a few light touches of 2017’s First Reformed thrown in for good measure), an impressively deep cast of talent, and an incredible aesthetic (and poetic) understanding of its Tulsa, Oklahoma setting.

That aesthetic gives “Pilot” an intoxicating lived-in feel, as it introduces us to part-time journalist, part-time bookstore owner, and full-time “truthstorian” Lee Raybon (loosely based on the life of Lee Roy Chapman), and follows him around as he makes the rounds around his neighborhood. Raybon is exactly the kind of protagonist you’d expect him to be; he pokes at figures of authority, gets scolded by his ex-wife for his inability to have a stable income or life, and strings his life together with income from articles he writes in local newspapers and the occasional sale of a rare book.

“Pilot” begins with the suicide of Dale Washberg, a seemingly-ostracized sibling of a very rich local family (played by the always-welcome Tim Blake Nelson), following the recent pubilcation of a Raybon piece exposing some of the family’s (presumably dark) secrets. After Raybon finds a hidden note inside a book he steals from the dead man’s estate sale, Raybon finds himself itching to discover what was really happening underneath the inscrutable surface of Dale’s life, and what undesirable roads it may lead down. All this while he’s trying to try and be a father to his daughter, while also avoiding the local white supremacists he’s pissed off with his recent written work; it’s a busy life for Lee Raybon, a man who has clearly has spent most of his adult life figuring things out on the fly, trusting his instincts that the world will either bend to his will, or give just enough that he can continue to push forward, driving his white van around Tulsa to find answers to the questions nobody wants to be asked.

The entirety of the first hour is spent with Raybon, allowing The Lowdown to slowly open its lens to introduce the many personalities he interacts with in Harjo’s Tulsa, offering “Pilot” a richness of setting and secondary characters not offered pilots with such an intense singular focus. But through these people, who range from local tax attorneys to his store employee’s older brother, it gives The Lowdown exactly the kind of texture and pacing it needs to be a slow-boiling crime drama, drenched in sunlight and implication, as the episode follows Raybon and fills in the world around him.

Again, nothing in “Pilot” is particularly ingenious or inventive – there’s a mysterious man who gives him advice in a local diner, some dumbass skinheads who get themselves a little too involved, and clearly diabolical corporate interests at play – but it embodies the archetypes of character and narrative with such personality and detail that The Lowdown‘s first hour, which is a full 59 minutes long, flies by without ever feeling perfunctory or overly cliche – even when Lee is reading the dead man’s note, which mentions other hidden notes hidden in other classic books, a narrative touch that would feel navel-gazing and cheap in a series overfocusing on its central plot. Here, it feels like a natural entryway into letting Lee Raybon be the most natural, unhinged version of himself he can be – which we eventually get a brief glimpse of, after he’s nearly killed by the two skinheads who broke into his apartment (and then watches them get brutally murdered by a member of the family he’s been investigating).

Outside of its inherent predictability (with regard to the basic beats of character in story), it’s hard to find fault with “Pilot”, an enviously self-assured pilot with a lot of personality and a distinct sense of self so many 2025 shows are lacking (it’s really this and The Pitt standing alone at this point in 2025). I’m extremely intrigued to see how The Lowdown‘s many thoughts on community, life, and art filter through its story of a semi-failed writer and the town he’s trying to bring truth to – if the confident voice of “Pilot” is any sign, The Lowdown‘s going to easily be one of the best shows of 2025.

Grade: A-

Other thoughts/observations:

• Welcome to The Lowdown reviews! Thoughts on episode two will publish later this week, and then every Wednesday following the airing of a new episode.
  
• Among the cast is Killer Mike, who features as the publisher of Tulsa Beat, a newspaper about “booty and bad guys”. He is also one of multiple people who note that “white man who care” are the worst.
  
• I love the tax attorney Dan, who is introduced talking to someone on the phone just calling them a piece of shit over and over again.
  
• Even while being beat by a Neo-Nazi, Lee is particular about the details; when they call his publication a newspaper, he is quick to point out “it’s a long-form magazine!”
  
• Donald, Dale’s older brother, is a politician (played by Kyle MacLachlan) who may or may not be banging his dead, gay brother’s ex-wife (Jeanne Tripplehorn).
  
• “Pain is only temporary.” “Yeah, until it ain’t!”
  
• Was nice to see Johnny Pemberton… until it became clear this would be the only episode he featured in.
  
• Keith David appears as a man who seems to know about things, and carries a badge of some sort… and that’s it, outside of knowing he’s been following Lee around in a maroon Kia.
  
• I’ve come around on the “crime walls” that are so cliche on crime dramas, to the point I was a bit excited to see that Lee has one in his shitty not-really-an-apartment.
  
• Lee, to his daughter (who is considering living with her mother full-time): “90 percent of writers are failed writers! What is success anyway? Making money or writing the book. I think writing the book.”
  
• Lee’s employee, Diedra, gets a pussy tattoo on her arm… she took half a day off to to get it, but I still think she might want to get her money back, because it looked terrible. Then again, when on Lee’s payroll what can you afford?
  
• “I’m saying a faint heart never fucked a bobcat.”