Sterlin Harjo on 'The Lowdown' Season 2: Tommy Lee Jones, Prisons and Pain

By Tom Whitfield

"The Lowdown" returns to FX on Oct. 14 at 9 p.m. ET, and Season 2 opens with Tommy Lee Jones playing the estranged father of Ethan Hawke's citizen journalist Lee Raybon. That casting coup lands at the end of the first episode. It is the loudest signal that creator Sterlin Harjo is escalating a show he describes as built to "go harder and faster with everything that we have established."

The season's spine is a new mystery: public defender Ginger (Betty Gilpin) recruits Lee to investigate the disappearance of her client inside the Oklahoma prison system. Harjo told Variety the premise came from a question he could not shake.

"It's really hard to go missing in prison. There's a sign-in sheet," he said. "How do you go missing from prison? That was such an intriguing question."

Where did the story come from?

Harjo cites three films as the underlying influences: the 1972 Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman thriller "Prime Cut," 1981's "Cutter's Way" and the 1949 noir "The Third Man." He, fellow executive producer Duffy Boudreau and Hawke sketched the plot's bones during the Season 1 press tour.

The prison material is not invented from nothing. Harjo grew up in a town with a prison and visited his uncle as a child in a McAlester, Oklahoma, institution where his uncle served time for repeat alcohol offenses. "The Lowdown" shot Season 2 in that same prison.

"You really saw this shift in the town, and not a positive one," Harjo said of his hometown. "Because you have drugs, you have trafficking, you have drug trafficking of guards and prisoners."

The team also consulted Hawke's cousin, a public defender in Fort Worth, who shared stories from her practice.

Is the acclaim storyline personal?

Yes, explicitly. The season opens with Lee, up for a local media award for his Season 1 reporting, instead drunkenly berating the crowd as sellouts. Harjo admitted to Variety that Lee's inability to accept recognition mirrors his own experience after "Reservation Dogs" debuted on FX.

"'Reservation Dogs' Season 1 truly changed my whole life. And I didn't handle it well at first," Harjo said. "All of a sudden, there's articles, and there's all this stuff and you're very exposed."

He bet Lee would handle recognition "really wrong," with "a knee-jerk reaction to reject it." The theme of Season 2, Harjo says, is learning how to love yourself and how that love extends to everyone around you.

How did Tommy Lee Jones sign on?

Harjo wrote the first episode of Season 2 and immediately thought of Jones for the father role. Both share the agency CAA. Jones read the script and wanted in — he had already watched Season 1 and told Harjo he specifically loved the bookstore security guards Waylon (Cody Lightning) and Cousin Henry (Jude Barnett), the show's comic-rellex pair.

"He wanted to be with them, which that told me everything I needed to know," Harjo said. "If you love the security guards, you love me and the show and the vibe."

After the premiere, Jones told Harjo: "Thanks for paying attention to the character Waylon, because most people wouldn't. It's characters and storylines like that I think make the show what it is."

Jones also started watching "Reservation Dogs" during production. Harjo called it "amazing" to hear Jones describe episodes of his own show to Hawke and him daily, adding that the actor is "a sophisticated, really smart artist and he loved it."

The season's father-son machinery is deliberately knotted. Lee Sr. neglected his son; Lee Jr. repeats the pattern with his own daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), while his father connects with the granddaughter. "The more complicated you can make all that stuff, the better, because you've got to fight your way out of it as a writer," Harjo said — and confessed the process was painful, with episodes being written deep into production. "I hope I never have to do that again!"

What does this change for viewers?

Gilpin's Ginger, a love interest who can match Lee's wildness, was reshaped on set. Harjo says she improvised in her first scene and he rewrote toward her voice from that day forward.

The first two episodes premiere Oct. 14 on FX and Hulu, with remaining episodes weekly on Wednesdays. Harjo's ambition is explicit: "Let's make 'Empire Strikes Back,' where it's great and it stands on its own, but you also want more by the end. Gods of TV willing, we'll be making a Season 3 of this show."