The Lowdown is back and kicking off Season 2 with back-to-back episodes setting up Tulsa “truthstorian” Lee Raybon’s (Ethan Hawke) next mystery, paired with more than a little family drama. Warning: Spoilers for The Lowdown, Season 2 Episodes 1-2!
Despite Lee’s role in the Sterlin Harjo-created series, Season 2 of The Lowdown opens with the introduction of his father, Lee Raybon Sr. (Tommy Lee Jones), who is picked up by the police and escorted to Tulsa, seen as a confused old man. When Lee Sr. arrives at his son’s bookshop, he’s met with hostility, setting up tension between the men right away, which is only made worse on Lee’s end when his father attempts to build a relationship with Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong).
“Lee Senior is on a mission to rejoin his family, and he’s prepared himself in some weird and odd ways for the obstacles he’s going to face, and he faces them in weird and odd ways,” Jones teases to TV Insider. “But he is seeking a reunion, and we don’t know that until we see him doing it. There’s not a lot of signposts or messaging along with these tides here of the human heart.”
The problem is, Lee only ever told his daughter that her grandfather was dead, which labeled him a liar when Lee Sr. resurfaced. But while the first two episodes only briefly set up this tension for the journalist who is chomping at the bit for the kind of story that will get his creative juices flowing, it’s a chance encounter at a disastrous awards event where Lee met his fix: Ginger (Betty Gilpin).
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The public defender approached Lee to ask if she was being followed by some men, which he confirmed, and it turned out she’d been digging into the case of a client who’d gone missing in the prison system. The trouble is, she’d been linked to the prisoner in a more personal way, which makes her motives a little more desperate.
“Something that’s so apparent about Sterlin’s writing is that he’s asking big questions about the place he lives and the person he is and the people he’s around, and reading it makes you do the same about yourself and about your part,” Gilpin shares about tackling the complex role of Ginger. “It’s infectious… not only are we all so invested in this moment, but like every department woke up thinking about their work and with 10 ideas because the scripts just sort of invite that level of engagement, and inspiration.”
And it’s that level of engagement that pushed Gilpin to take on some of the wilder moments of Ginger’s onscreen ride, particularly in a shared scene with Pookie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), in which she bribed him to collect information about her missing client, in exchange for giving him access to her feet, in one of the show’s more bizarre sequences.
“It was also my first day of work,” Gilpin reveals of filming that sequence. “So that was my introduction to everybody. It was a good gauntlet though.” Ultimately, the effort yields the results Ginger wants, which is Pookie’s promise to collect any information about the missing inmate, while Ginger is left to deal with Lee after asking him for his help.
“It was a freeing experience to have the artist Christopher Mintz-Plasse suck on my toes in the name of Sterlin’s vision,” Gilpin concludes.
As for Harjo, he reveals that the inspiration for the scene came from wanting to represent the interrogation format in a new way. “What could she do to sort shift this power and get what she needs from this person… in a way that doesn’t feel like your normal TV show where you’ve got someone in an interrogation room trying to get information out of them… what is a unique way to make that happen?” And so, he landed on this.
Will Lee and Ginger uncover the mystery of her missing client? What will happen next between Lee and Lee Sr.? Stay tuned to find out, and let us know what you thought of the wild two-episode premiere in the comments section below. And check out the full video interview above.
The Lowdown, Wednesdays, 9/8c, FX