Ethan Hawke and Keith David are playing investigators in The Lowdown, a woolly Southwestern neo-noir, on television, every week. Isn’t that the damnedest thing? It’s wild what we take for granted when it comes to TV. By this point, it’s medium that’s given bonafide movie stars a chance to stretch their legs, inhabit a character for longer, and/or stay out of the house where they live with their increasingly estranged husband Keith Urban. Watching those two guys run around doing mystery stuff in this fun little episode, it hit me again what a cool business this can be.

On the Keith David side, Marty, the aging PI with the voice of an Old Testament prophet, gets a new job from his paymaster, right-wing gubernatorial candidate Donald Washburg. It’s a real shit detail: He must deliver walking papers to Donald’s widowed sister-in-law — and mistress — Betty Jo. Turns out the prenup she signed was with the family trust, not with her late husband Dale, so Donald now owns her property and wants her off it. Marty gets to be the dogsbody who brings her the bad news. In anger, she tells him Donald cries when he orgasms. Some job.

Marty isn’t the only, ahem, “contractor” at work in Tulsa, of course. He’s cornered at a diner by Allen, the sinister red-headed ex-skinhead who’s since cleaned up and gone to work for the mysterious land-grabbing company, Akron. Allen hints that he’s aware Marty helped their mutual acquaintance, that nosy reporter Lee Raybon, when he was kidnapped and locked in a trunk by skinheads. He hints further that Marty should remember Lee is the enemy of their mutual benefactors if he knows what’s good for him.

Meanwhile, Lee — still in nominal custody of his daughter Francis, who’s becoming the Watson to his Sherlock Holmes — sets out to track down the collection of crime novels missing from Dale’s estate. Ray, the blabbermouthed antiques dealer Lee asked to snag them, says he was outfoxed by a rival named Catalina (Flavia Carbone), a real bruja they should stay away from if they know what’s good for them. (Ray seems both very superstitious, very drunk, and maybe a wee bit racist here.)

When Ray mentions Catalina is married to a poacher who lives in a houseboat on the marina where he, Lee, and Francis are eating, Lee springs into action. Stealing a Fish and Wildlife Department employee’s jacket, he attempts to strongarm the poachers; once again, he gets kidnapped for his troubles. 

This time he finds himself at the tender mercies of a pair of brothers who harvest and sell bootleg caviar from the lake’s paddlefish. They pass it off as the genuine beluga article, sell it for a fortune, and from America to Russia, none of the elites who eat this shit have any clue. That’s just the way Marlon (John Doe), the intimidatingly grizzled older brother and leader of the outfit, likes it. The way he sees it, what they’re doing is waging class war, plain and simple.

You can imagine how Lee reacts when he hears that. Though he at first tries to run away, he winds up winning Marlon over with his “tale of woe” — a wild story we only hear snippets of, involving doing crystal meth for the first time at a Dairy Queen in Fort Worth and winding up naked in the back of a paddywagon on account of a topless woman he’s not even convinced actually existed. Marlon’s now convinced that Lee is neither a Fish and Wildlife employee nor a member of the elite himself, but the writer he claims to be.

Thus, a bargain is struck. In exchange for his freedom, Lee suggests playing Cyrano for Marlon, helping him write the love letter to his estranged wife Catalina (she kicked him out and took his boathouse) that he knows he has inside him but lacks the skill to express. (“I’m sort of a poetic dyslexic,” Marlon says, smiling ruefully.) Artful overlays make it clear that even while Lee’s writing about Catalina, he’s thinking about his own ex.

What Lee hasn’t counted on is his daughter’s own ingenuity. By the time he finally makes it back to the marina, Francis has snuck into Catalina’s houseboat, won the (pretty nice, actually) antiques dealer over…and stolen the box full of Dale’s crime novels she found inside the boat. Unfortunately, she and Ray, who is three sheets to the wind by now, are too slow to escape; Catalina has a couple of henchmen seize and burn the books, seemingly just to spite Francis. (“They’re first editions!” cries a horrified Lee when he sees the inferno.)

But Francis listens when her father talks, even if maybe that’s often a waste of time. Recalling his claim that it’s not the books themselves that are important, but what’s inside the books, Francis secretly retrieves all of Dale’s hidden notes from the collection before Catalina destroys it. Ray’s joy, and his admiration for his child’s canniness, is so sincere it practically radiates from within him, like Mario getting a star. It’s a lovely, lovely moment. What’s more, it tells you exactly why Francis would put up with getting abandoned to a drunk friend while her dad disappears for an afternoon, a kind of love Catalina scoffs at: It’s for moments like this.

Scott Teems’s script for this episode is tight as hell. It’s hard to strike the right balance of levity and genuine menace when your hero is (let’s face it) a goofball, but it’s nevertheless important to convey to the audience a feeling of peril, even terror at times. Allen’s confrontation with Marty is appropriately intimidating. Meanwhile, creator-director Sterlin Harjo uses woozy fades, overlays, and punishing metal music to show how frightening Lee’s latest abduction is for him, even if Marlon and his kid brother (Robert Peters) both end up being alright guys in the end.

That’s the other thing about the script: It’s really good at showing these people to be alright guys. From “The Beluga Brothers,” who just want to make a living, stick it to the man, and hopefully heal Marlon’s broken heart; to Ray, a shameless gossip with no off switch who nevertheless braved the disapproval of his Bible-thumping mother to come out as a teenager, which impresses Francis a great deal; to Francis herself, a kid doing her best with her unconventional parent, adjusting for adult foibles the way children are sadly so good at doing; to Marty, or Chubs as his old friends Donald and Betty Jo call him, a man who would clearly rather be doing anything with his time than Donald’s dirty work; to Lee himself, a mess but a mensch. That’s a combination I think a lot of us find aspirational.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.