Have you been watching “The Lowdown” on Hulu?
Sterlin Harjo’s follow-up to “Reservation Dogs” features Ethan Hawke as a bookstore owner and local muckraking journalist trying to get to the bottom of bad goings-on in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The series finale airs Nov. 4, so you can catch up if you’ve missed it.
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And here’s why you should consider checking it out: Partially set in a bookstore with a plot that is triggered by some old Jim Thompson novels, there may be no other show on right now so lovingly aimed at readers, writers and lovers of books (and music) that is also such an ungovernably rollicking crime story (that has some, you know, adult situations, so be forewarned). It even squeezes in a visit to another bookstore, Tulsa’s Magic City Books.
In fact, early in the show, the line “You must be a writer” is used as a punchline in a way that only a writer could conjure up – and then love the insult so much that it didn’t get cut.
(Even the artwork is real. A Joe Brainard painting in the series is based on an actual piece.)
Along with Harjo and screenwriters Liz Blood, Oliva Purnell, Sneha Koorse and more, top-tier crime novelists Walter Mosley and Lou Berney contribute to the writing, and the talented cast includes many writers.
Hawke and Tim Blake Nelson have each written novels and screenplays; musicians and writers John Doe of X, singer-songwriter Ken Pomeroy and Run the Jewels’ Michael “Killer Mike” Render all play important roles in the story; and Tracy Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “August Osage County,” and Tom McCarthy, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director, are pivotal characters in the story. (I won’t try to mention everyone else, but Keith David, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Siena East, Peter Dinklage and the late Graham Greene are all terrific.)
Anyway, none of that would matter if it weren’t a good time. It most definitely is.