Drama in a Time of No Consequences
In The Lowdown, Sterlin Harjo’s FX noir set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ethan Hawke’s Lee Raybon sets out to right a wrong. The amateur journalist believes Dale Washberg, the black-sheep son of a powerful local family, has been murdered, and Lee is bound and determined to get to the truth, bring down the corrupt Washberg family, and, as an ancillary benefit, bask in the smug satisfaction of his own correctness. Lee goes on exactly the kind of wall-of-red-string mission that should get him to the bottom of this mystery, and he does learn the truth eventually, after winding through discoveries about paddlefish caviar, vintage books, and his changing relationship with his teen daughter.
Yet The Lowdown’s mystery is not that engaging. The real question is whether the solution will actually matter when knowing the truth probably won’t change anything. Elsbeth, one of the few big network procedurals of recent years, is built on the old Columbo model of detective storytelling, in which the engine is not about discovering the culprit but whether the heroine will figure out how to bring the culprit to justice. Task, the HBO crime drama about gritty, damaged men muddling their way through economic hardship and illegal drug wars, marks a shift from creator Brad Ingelsby’s previous show, Mare of Easttown, which kept a tight lid until the very end on who committed its central murder. Task leaves little doubt about who has done which crimes; the drama comes from the results. Will Mark Ruffalo’s sad detective puts all the pieces together? And if so, how much will it actually change anything in these communities?
The basic rules of narrative storytelling rely on the idea that because one thing happens, something else results. But they ring hollow in an age of widespread proof that not every action results in an equal and opposite reaction. The past decade of American life is pockmarked with holes where consequences for wrongdoing should be. There has been no dearth of the evidence-gathering “law” part of a Law & Order episode, often on huge public stages: long, careful hearings about the January 6 insurrection and lists of American citizens kidnapped by immigration officers. And the facts, all the time: statistics about how many people have died in Gaza, how little crime is committed by trans people, how many gun casualties are linked to histories of domestic violence. Yet the “order” part, where all that evidence results in action, rarely arises. The guns stay on store shelves, insurrectionists get pardoned, and pundits keep telling leftists to stop talking about trans rights. When action does happen, it’s the Supreme Court deciding that, actually, it’s perfectly fine to discriminate against certain members of the population. How do you tell a story in a world where effect is divorced from cause?
The Lowdown isn’t the only series to confront our cultural environment, but its richness comes from finding interesting answers to the conundrum this environment presents. Like Elsbeth or Poker Face, another crime show that never has a mystery about who did it, The Lowdown telegraphs early who’s responsible for Dale’s death. No viewer will be shocked to learn that two goons for hire killed him, because everybody who looked suspicious at the beginning is, as it turns out, suspicious. Real-estate-company lackey Frank Martin (Tracy Letts) hulks around in the background the whole time, wearing an “I have money” tech-bro fleece vest and glaring at people. Of course, he was in cahoots with Dale’s wife, Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and when Frank pays two local skinheads to frighten Dale, they kill him by accident. The glaringly obvious evildoer and patently secretive femme fatale are guilty the whole time. And it’s not especially astonishing that, in Oklahoma, the whole mystery rests on profiting off land stolen from Indigenous owners.
Because The Lowdown is a noir, there’s precedent that the story may end without heroic triumph or reward. Betty Jo walks away largely unscathed, and Dale’s brother, Donald, gets elected governor of the state. Frank dies, but not because he murdered an innocent man — he gets killed by one of the skinheads’ mothers seeking revenge. The public never learns that a corrupt real-estate corporation tried to build a white-nationalist conclave on stolen Indigenous land, and Lee’s frantic attempt to make things right ends in futile tragedy. He’s so sure that Arthur Williams, the land’s rightful owner, should fight against the Washbergs and restore his family’s claim, but Arthur and his grandson protest that the whole thing’s poison, they don’t want it. Lee ignores them, and his self-serving need to fix things and soothe his own sense of injustice leads to sloppiness. Frank discovers Lee’s meddling and skulks into Arthur’s apartment and murders him. Obsessed with bringing Frank to justice for the land plot and now Arthur’s death on top of it, Lee finds himself in the finale pointing a gun at a church full of people. Never mind that the congregation is filled with white supremacists — at that moment, waving a weapon in front of children in pews, Lee is the bad guy.
The Lowdown could be forgiven for shrugging its shoulders and declaring there’s no point in hoping for justice. Forget it, Lee, it’s Tulsa. Instead, it looks for narrative payoff elsewhere. Donald wins the governor’s race, but Lee blackmails him into signing over his family’s land to the Osage Nation in memory of his late brother. That’s a huge win for Donald, who gets to coast on the good optics of self-sacrifice and restitution for his family’s generational crimes. Lee, though, is left surveying the damage he has wreaked in his own life. His meddling resulted in the death of an innocent man, and his inability to stop himself from haring off to fix someone else’s problems has alienated his daughter, who needs her father to show up for her. Finally, he’s forced to deny his own ego in order to eke out a good result from his bad actions. To get Donald to give back the land, Lee can’t publicize his role in the negotiations or report on any of the Washberg secrets he uncovered.
It’s not an Agatha Christie ending, in which merely identifying the wrongdoer is enough because the justice that comes afterward is a foregone conclusion. But it’s not the ending to Chinatown, either, which concludes that some injustices are just too big to tackle. Nor is it a Raymond Chandler noir, where the detective can do nothing but walk into the mist and hope to find the will to wake up the next morning. The sense of hopefulness at the end of The Lowdown comes from Lee’s gradual ability to see that the road has been littered with consequences the whole time and he’s just been too pigheaded to see them. The results Lee longed for were always a mirage, an external validation of his own righteous worldview. He’s not wrong to look for the truth, he realizes, but he cannot insist that everyone else face the consequences while dodging his own culpability. He has to live with a different set of repercussions from the ones he hoped he would find, and he must come to terms with all the blind spots and assumptions that fuel his insatiable need for answers.
When Lee walks into his ex-wife’s wedding at the end of the season, he is not a triumphant hero. He won’t win his wife back, and his daughter won’t run into his arms and declare she forgives him for all the times he missed parent-teacher conferences. Once Lee’s willing to understand how much damage he caused, he begins to accept a resolution based on what people actually need from him, rather than on his own abstract ideas of justice. Lee intended from the beginning to write a huge, searing, blockbuster feature on the Washberg family’s corruption. Writing another story instead, a celebration of Dale’s life, is an act filled with hopefulness for the future. Lee can change. In trying to understand Dale, he can see himself more clearly and accept that there are always consequences, even if they don’t fall where you want them to.
Like other TV noirs before it, The Lowdown seems on track to play to a warm but not particularly large audience. The list is frustrating in how much promise these shows have had and how little audience they found: Perry Mason, Terriers, Teenage Bounty Hunters. (Shows like True Detective and Veronica Mars are exceptions that prove the rule, with each of them only briefly flirting with mainstream success.) It makes sense. These are inherently less comforting shows than the bog-standard TV mystery defined by straightforward answers and the implied restitution of the public order. The Lowdown is proof that a narrative can find a satisfying ending without resorting to pat oversimplification or easy apologies, and it offers an avenue out of the nihilism of a lack of consequences. Its sense of triumph is sturdier and more enduring than the rickety abstraction of empty justice. Lee Raybon has the courage to acknowledge his mistakes and keep going.