'The Lowdown' Season 2 Premieres October 14 on FX: Ethan Hawke Is Back in Tulsa, and Tommy Lee Jones Is His Father

Tulsa is calling Lee Raybon back to work. Season 2 of The Lowdown premieres tonight, Wednesday, October 14, on FX, with a two-episode premiere at 9 p.m. ET, according to FX listings, and streaming on Hulu, with Disney+ carrying the series internationally. It is a fast return for a show that only arrived last fall, and it comes with the kind of casting announcement that changes the temperature of a whole season: Tommy Lee Jones is joining the series as Lee Raybon Sr., the estranged father Lee has spent years trying not to talk about.

Ethan Hawke returns as Lee Raybon, who runs a rare-book shop in Tulsa and describes his real occupation with a word of his own making. He is a citizen journalist and self-styled truthstorian, a man who digs into the stories powerful people in Oklahoma would prefer to leave buried, and who treats a hunch like a debt he has to collect. That instinct powered the first season, built around the death of Dale Washberg and the long shadow that case cast over a wealthy, well-connected family. Lee solved that case, but solving it did not exactly make his life tidier, safer or easier to explain to the people around him.

A local honor Lee does not quite trust

The new season finds Lee in an unfamiliar position: celebrated, at least a little. He comes into Season 2 fresh off that Washberg investigation and carrying a local journalism award for the work, an honor he is openly uneasy about. It is a sharp place to start the character. Lee has always worked as an outsider, poking at institutions from the margins of Tulsa life, and an award threatens to turn the outsider into part of the furniture. The season uses that discomfort well, because the moment Lee might be tempted to enjoy being right in public, a new case arrives that demands he go back to being difficult in private.

That case comes through Ginger, a public defender played by new cast member Betty Gilpin, who needs help finding a missing client, an inmate who has disappeared from where he was supposed to be. For a public defender, a missing client is not an abstract mystery. It is a person the system can lose very easily, and a person whose absence can quietly close doors that should stay open. For Lee, it is exactly the sort of low-to-the-ground case he cannot leave alone: no glamour, no obvious headline, just a missing man, a worried lawyer and a trail that starts in the parts of the system most people never look at.

The father Lee said was dead

Then the season turns personal in a way Season 1 only hinted at. Tommy Lee Jones plays Lee Raybon Sr., Lee’s father, a grifter whose return forces a reckoning Lee has been postponing for years. The complication is not only that the two men are estranged. It is that Lee told his daughter, Francis, played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, that her grandfather was dead. A lie like that does not stay contained when the supposedly dead man walks back into town. It lands on Lee’s credibility as a father at the same moment a case is testing his credibility as an investigator, and it gives Hawke and Jones a shared history to play that is built out of avoidance, charm and old cons.

Jones does not do much television, which is part of why this casting matters, and he does not do many public appearances either. His appearance at the Austin premiere on October 7 was noted as a rare public outing, and it underlined how deliberately this role has been chosen. A grifter father in a Tulsa noir, written with room for humor as well as menace, is a part that lets Jones do the thing he has always done best: say very little, let the room adjust to him, and make every other character reveal themselves by how they handle his silence. Paired with Hawke, whose Lee talks, schemes and improvises his way forward, the contrast should be the season in miniature.

Tulsa, the way Sterlin Harjo builds it

The series was created by Sterlin Harjo, the filmmaker behind Reservation Dogs, and Tulsa is not a backdrop he borrows. It is the subject as much as any case is. Harjo builds stories out of specific streets, specific rooms and specific local arrangements of power, and The Lowdown shares that attention. The rare-book shop, the legal offices, the small-town jurisdictions at the edge of the story — all of it is meant to feel lived in rather than dressed. That grounding is what keeps the show’s mysteries from floating away into generic crime-drama territory. Every secret in this Tulsa belongs to somebody, and usually to somebody who knows exactly where Lee lives.

The returning company helps hold that world together. Keith David is back as Marty, bringing the kind of calm authority that can make a scene feel settled right up until it should not. Martha Plimpton guest stars as a small-town sheriff, a piece of casting that promises the missing-inmate case will widen beyond Tulsa’s city limits and into places where Lee’s reputation, good or bad, does not travel ahead of him in the same way. Gilpin, as Ginger, gives the season its engine: a client-facing professional whose problem becomes Lee’s problem, and whose standards for how this work should be done are not the same as his.

How we got to a second season this quickly

Season 1 premiered on September 23, 2025, ran eight episodes and built its audience the steady way, through word of mouth about Hawke’s shambling, obsessive lead performance and Harjo’s sense of place. FX renewed the series in January 2026, and the turnaround to an October premiere is brisk by modern television standards, where two-year gaps between seasons have become routine. An eight-episode Season 2, with new episodes following on Wednesdays on FX and Hulu after tonight’s double premiere, keeps that momentum. Viewers who found the show late get a clean entry point tonight — a new case, a new central relationship and a family secret that needs no homework to understand — while returning viewers get the payoff for everything Season 1 left unsaid about where Lee came from.

What to watch in the opening two episodes is how the three threads braid together. The missing client gives the season its forward motion, Ginger gives it a professional conscience that can argue back, and Raybon Sr. gives it a past that will not stay buried. If the premiere holds those in balance, The Lowdown will be doing what the best regional crime dramas do: using one man’s bad habits to map a whole community, its favors, its debts and its talent for looking the other way. Tonight is the start of that map being redrawn. For more of what is premiering and returning this week, browse our TV coverage, dig through the full browse library, and keep up with the day’s other stories in the news section.