The Lowdown season 2 premiere and cast: Tommy Lee Jones plays the father Ethan Hawke's Lee told his daughter was dead
Tulsa's "truthstorian" spent season 1 digging up other families' secrets. Season 2 opens with his own walking through the door.
The Lowdown season 2 premiered Wednesday, October 14, on FX, with episodes on Hulu the next day and Disney+ internationally. The season runs eight episodes: two on premiere night, then one every Wednesday through the November 25 finale. Episode titles run from "The Rupidoop" and "Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound" to "Hot Weeners!," which is the most Sterlin Harjo episode-title lineup imaginable.
The casting coup is the headline: Tommy Lee Jones joins as Lee Raybon Sr., father of Ethan Hawke's Lee. The sting is in the family history — Lee told his daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) that her grandfather died years ago. Jones even made one of his famously rare red-carpet appearances for the premiere, which tells you how much this role meant to somebody.
Francis spent season 1 helping her father chase other people's truths. Season 2 starts with her learning her grandfather is alive — and that the lie was Lee's.
Who else is in Tulsa this season
- Returning: Hawke as Lee, Keith David as Marty — now managing editor of the Heartland Press — plus Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kaniehtiio Horn, Rafael Casal, and Michael Hitchcock.
- New: Betty Gilpin as Ginger, a public defender who pulls Lee into the season's case: a client who vanished from a state penitentiary.
- Also new: Martha Plimpton, Clifton Collins Jr., and Austin Amelio, because Harjo doesn't waste a season.
Harjo has been open about the anthology-adjacent structure, telling TV Insider that each season is its own chapter — this one is called "The Sensitive Kind," after the J.J. Cale song. Hawke, for his part, has described the show's design the same way:
"The dream was to create something that has a satisfying beginning, middle, and end."
— Ethan Hawke, to TV Insider
The missing-prisoner case gives the season its mystery, but the trailer leans hardest on the family secret. The show that made its name on Tulsa's buried history now has two generations of Raybon men withholding it from each other, and eight Wednesdays to dig it all up.
Previously we wrote: Yellowjackets has one season left to live up to season 1