The Lowdown Season 2 is here — and if you care about great television, critics say this is the one you cannot afford to skip. FX‘s scrappy citizen-journalist drama, starring Ethan Hawke as Tulsa “truthstorian” Lee Raybon, returns for its second season with a two-episode premiere on October 14, 2026, and the early reviews are glowing. (Credits: Our Insane Blogs)
Created by Sterlin Harjo, the mind behind the beloved Reservation Dogs, The Lowdown was one of the standout TV debuts of 2025. Season 1 followed Lee Raybon, a self-declared “truthstorian” working out of a rare-books store in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as his obsessive digging into the death of Dale Washberg pulled him into the city’s underbelly. The show scraped by to earn a Season 2 renewal in January — and somehow, it was never the breakout hit it deserved to be.
A Small Show With a Big Heart
Part of the show’s charm is that it was never built to be a phenomenon. The Lowdown is a warm, textured crime comedy-drama — what fans have taken to calling “Tulsa noir” — that blends gritty investigative stakes with stoner-comedy looseness. Think The Big Lebowski wandering into a Justified episode, anchored by Hawke’s lived-in performance and Harjo’s signature affection for his characters.
Season 1’s run ended with Lee’s reporting on the Washberg case earning him the local Citizen Journalist of the Year award — a bit of recognition the scrappy investigator is not exactly emotionally equipped to handle. That award, and Lee’s famously unconventional acceptance speech, kick off the new season.
What to Expect in Season 2
Season 2 opens with a brand-new case: Lee digs into a disappearance from a state penitentiary, an investigation that quickly spirals into a conspiracy inside the Tulsa sheriff’s department. As always, Lee’s obsession with the truth keeps getting him into trouble — this time with the law itself.
The new season also brings heavyweight company. Tommy Lee Jones joins the cast as Lee Raybon Sr., Lee’s estranged grifter father — his first series role in decades, and a complication made all the more awkward by the fact that Lee told his teenage daughter her grandfather was dead. Betty Gilpin arrives as Ginger, a public defender who enlists Lee’s unorthodox skills and is, per the season description, “uncommonly immune to his charms.”
With eight episodes rolling out weekly on FX and streaming on Hulu (Disney+ internationally), Season 2 has every ingredient of an underdog triumph: a magnetic lead, a creator at the top of his game, and a story about a guy who refuses to stop digging. The Lowdown earned its second season the hard way. The least we can do is watch it.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.