There’s no real reason for this episode of The Lowdown to debut as the second half of a back-to-back series premiere. The pilot episode pretty much gives you all you need to know about Lee Raybon and his world — the lowdown, if you will — and episode 2 doesn’t really upend or challenge what’s already been established in any way. We didn’t need extra time to meet more main characters, as virtually every above-the-line actor in the thing appeared in the actual series premiere. Speaking personally, I think ending on Lee driving to pick up his daughter while hooting, hollering, and bleeding out of several gashes in his face and skull is a more compelling “tune in next week” image than Lee and his daughter being scared in his bookshop.
If there’s a rationale for the decision to air the first two episodes of The Lowdown back to back, I suspect it’s this: They assumed people would just wanna spend some more time with this guy. I think they assumed correctly.
This episode advances several different storylines, though they do have a tendency to keep coming back around to each other. Marty, the “silver-throated” mystery man with the “voice like honey” as the rhapsodic diner waitress Sally puts it, works for Donald Washberg, the exact corrupt right-wing politician Lee’s been striving to put away.
It’s an odd fit, Lee figures, for a Black man who’s fond of quoting poetry to work for a racist shitkicker like Washberg; “Donald and I go way back” is Marty’s only explanation. Lee also questions why Marty freed him from his kidnappers’ trunk if he works for a man who hates him; not wanting to be an accessory to murder is his explanation this time, and Lee accepts this one more readily.
But Marty does not like it when Lee starts condescending to him about selling out to the Man. What could a “self-righteous cracker” like Lee ever really know about the Man? Clearly, Marty knows quite a bit, learned the hard way. (A man who looks like Lee can burst into a rich guy’s memorial service, scream that a vote for the dead man’s brother is “a vote for white supremacy,” and then sing “John Brown’s Body” off-key. Try that looking like Marty and see how far you get.)
Meanwhile, Lee continues to dig up dirt on the skinheads. Posing as an old jail buddy of one of the two slain men, he visits his mother (Dale Dickey) and her much younger boyfriend, Phil (Kerry Malloy), who was one of the dead mens’ Nazi pals. He tells the undercover truthstorian that Allen, the buttoned-up blue fleece vest–wearing redhead who (as only Lee knows) murdered the guys, was once an old-school Aryan Brotherhood member himself, serving time and everything. He’d been supplying the two dead guys with jobs — apparently until their mission with Donald Washberg’s now-dead brother Dale went wrong, hence Allen’s, ahem, termination of their employment agreement.
Eventually Lee does enough snooping to draw the attention, and ire, of the man himself. Allen waltzes into Lee’s bookstore, intimidating his daughter Francis and his cashier Deirdre until he shows up. Allen leaves, but not before slipping him both a business card and a thinly veiled threat, one that Francis both overhears and understands.
Bearing in mind that this show was written back when being a Nazi was a firing offense instead of a qualification for a sensitive White House position, how does a violent ex-con like Allen wind up working for a major development company like the omnipresent Akron? Moreover, Lee believes the company is putting the squeeze on the real estate market by buying up all the offices it can to crush the competition. With a skinhead involved near the top, is there more to it than that? The presence of ample documentation of Tulsa’s brutally racist history on the same conspiracy board where he’s tracking Akron and the Washbergs indicates that Lee certainly thinks there is.
These are interesting questions, and indeed somewhat urgent ones these days. The mystery plot they’re a part of is intriguing and engaging. But again, I don’t think that’s The Lowdown’s main selling point. I think it’s wanting to hang out with this bunch of weirdos, the noble fool Lee in particular. It’s about watching him pay a checkout girl a thousand dollars for a hat, cheap sunglasses, and “a brief makeup tutorial” to cover up his beating when he has to go pick up his kid for their weekend together.
It’s about hearing him bullshit as fast as humanly possible when he lies that jiu-jitsu training was responsible for his wounds, only for his wife’s new boyfriend Elijah (Zachary Booth) to be a dedicated BJJ practitioner who knows every gym and trainer in the area. Lee is eventually forced to claim he’s being trained by an 84-year-old man.
It’s about watching him interact with the equally colorful cast of characters. Cyrus, one of Lee’s publishers, is furious that angry skinheads have busted out his office windows, and adamantly refuses to take any of Lee’s “skinhead blood money” to fix it…until he actually sees the stack and asks for six, no, make that eight hundred. Dan, Lee’s tax-lawyer neighbor, has equally flexible morality: He’s willing to hide Lee’s blood money in his safe as long as he promises he was not directly responsible for the application of the blood to the money in the first place. (He’s much more reticent to hang on to the skinheads’ improbable first-edition copy of Mein Kampf, to his credit I’d say.)
The bad guy’s a fun one, too. No one who isn’t named “Leslie Nielsen” has had more fun poking fun at their square-jawed persona than Kyle MacLachlan has over the course of his career (even on Twin Peaks: The Return!). In this episode alone we watch him hump Jeanne Tripplehorn only to collapse crying into her arms upon climax, then insist on a ludicrous hair dye job to “court the youth vote.” When he and Lee nearly come to blows at Dale’s memorial service, he assumes a ludicrous Fighting Irish put up yer dukes boxing stance. He seems to be having as good a time here as he had on Fallout, which bodes well for the future of this shaggy-dog story of a show.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.