We were big fans of the first season of Sterlin Harjo’s new FX “Western noir comedy-drama” The Lowdown, giving the Ethan Hawke series not just a glowing review, but a top 10 placement on our list of the best TV of 2025. So we’re as excited as anybody else to see the network grant a second season to the series, which stars Hawke as a self-described “truthstorian” operating in Tulsa, OK, and regularly getting the shit kicked out of himself in his efforts to expose a seething current of white supremacy and corruption underneath its placid surface.
Given that the renewal notice from the network makes it clear that The Lowdown only technically has two main cast members—Hawke, plus Keith David, who plays a private investigator who ends up helping him on his Quixotic mission—while the rest of its highly heralded and star-studded cast (Kanietiio Horn, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Kyle MacLachlan, Tim Blake Nelson, Michael “Killer Mike” Render, and many others) were billed as guest stars, it’ll be interesting to see how far afield this second season will go from the first. (Horn and Armstrong, who play Hawke’s ex-wife and daughter, will presumably recur, but the show’s structure means we might be cycling through a whole new roster of Oklahoma weirdos and scumbags.)
Harjo’s follow-up to earlier comedy series Reservation Dogs, The Lowdown has been a critical success pretty much across the board, with numerous publications praising the show’s strange blend of hangout show and criminal mystery. (Hawke, especially, has come in for kudos for his extremely lived-in portrayal of Lee Raybon, a guy whose basic ridiculousness and inability to keep himself out of trouble lives comfortably with his underlying charisma.) No word yet on when the series, which ran its first season back in the fall of 2025, is expected to return, but the show will reportedly start filming its second season in the spring.
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