Is The Lowdown a true story? The real man died in 2015 — and his family says FX is 'muddying fact and fiction'
Ethan Hawke's Tulsa "truthstorian" is built on a real local journalist. His sister loved the idea of the show, and then she saw what it did with her brother's life.
FX's The Lowdown is back for a second season, which premiered October 14, 2026, and its hero is a man that Tulsa knew by a slightly different name. Ethan Hawke plays Lee Raybon, a bookseller and amateur historian who digs into the city's powerful families. Creator Sterlin Harjo built the character on a friend who died in 2015, and his sister has spent the past year saying the show has gotten too close to the real man for comfort.
The short answer: the man is real, and the story isn't. Lee Raybon is loosely based on Lee Roy Chapman, a Tulsa citizen journalist and historian. The mystery Raybon chases on screen is invented.
Who Lee Roy Chapman was
Chapman wrote about the history Tulsa would rather skip. He met Harjo at This Land Press, where Harjo filmed him telling stories about the city for a documentary series called Tulsa Public Secrets, per TV Insider. His best-known piece changed the map:
- The story: In April 2012, Chapman published "The Nightmare of Dreamland" in This Land, revealing that W. Tate Brady, one of Tulsa's founders, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, per Brady's Wikipedia biography.
- The street: In August 2013, the Tulsa City Council voted 7–1 to keep the name Brady Street but have it honor Civil War photographer Mathew Brady instead. The council later renamed it Reconciliation Way.
- The district: In September 2017, the Brady Arts District's business association voted to rename it the Tulsa Arts District.
Chapman died by suicide in 2015, at 46. His sister, Whitney Chapman, now runs the Center for Public Secrets, an organization for people who, like him, go looking for the truth.
"When someone like that leaves, you feel that absence."
— Sterlin Harjo, creator, to TheWrap
What's real and what isn't
Harjo has called Raybon an "homage to my friend who is no longer with us," and said Chapman was a jumping-off point, not someone he wanted Hawke to imitate. Whitney Chapman's account of the overlap, given to Public Radio Tulsa, is more specific:
- Real: Her brother's van and his bumper sticker made it on screen.
- Changed: His surname, from Chapman to Raybon.
- Invented: The central story. She says her brother was never thrown into the back of a car, and the scene at a lake involving caviar never happened.
The invented part is a conspiracy around the fictional Washberg family. In season 1, Raybon publishes an exposé on them, and soon after, Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), the family's black sheep, is found dead in an apparent suicide.
Why the family objects
Whitney Chapman's first public comments were warm. Speaking the week the show premiered in September 2025, she told KJRH her brother was "hilarious. Fun. Charming," and added, "With Lee, anything can happen."
Two months later, after watching, she told Public Radio Tulsa the show was hard for the family to watch.
"Still carries the weight of a real person's life."
— Whitney Chapman, on the Lee Raybon character, to Public Radio Tulsa
She says she wants the show to succeed. Her objection is that the creators should have consulted the family before building a character on a real man who died by suicide, and that her attempts to start that conversation went nowhere. FX didn't respond to Public Radio Tulsa's request for comment, and other family members haven't watched the series.
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The station's headline summed it up as the show "muddying fact and fiction," and the plot shows why that line matters here. The Lowdown's central mystery begins with a death written off as suicide, in a series inspired by a man who died that way.
The show kept going
None of this slowed FX down. Season 1 scored 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, made the American Film Institute's top 10 TV programs of 2025 and earned Hawke a Spirit Award nomination. FX renewed it in January 2026 and added Tommy Lee Jones and Betty Gilpin for season 2.
Lee Roy Chapman's best-known work got a city to rename a street because of who the old name honored. His sister is asking FX for a smaller correction: a conversation before the show tells any more stories about her brother.
Previously we wrote: What happened to Leon in The Drop? Not what Snowfall's ending promised him