Lee Raybon makes his living telling Tulsa the truth about everyone else, and he has been keeping one lie at home. He told his teenage daughter that his father was dead. In the second season of The Lowdown, the father walks back into town, played by Tommy Lee Jones, at the exact moment Lee has finally been rewarded for exposing other people’s secrets.

The Lowdown is the FX comic crime drama created by Sterlin Harjo, the Tulsa filmmaker behind Reservation Dogs, and it stars Ethan Hawke as Lee Raybon, a rare-books seller and self-described “truthstorian” whose obsession with the truth keeps getting him into trouble. In the United States it airs on FX and streams on Hulu and on Hulu inside Disney+; in most other markets it lives on Disney+. The new season adds two names to the ensemble: Tommy Lee Jones as Lee Raybon Sr., the estranged father, and Betty Gilpin as Ginger, a public defender with a missing client.

What season 2 of The Lowdown is about

FX’s synopsis opens with Lee winning a local citizen journalism award for his reporting on the death of Dale Washberg, the case that drove the first season, and then making a poor showing at the ceremony. Ginger takes his speech as a recommendation rather than a warning. She asks him to help find a client who vanished from a state prison, and the official description has Lee pulled straight into the case.

The official descriptions widen the frame quickly. Disney+ says the case pulls Lee toward corruption among Tulsa’s wealthy, and the trailer, as described by The A.V. Club, points him at two confirmed murders and the entire sheriff’s department. In the trailer Lee sums up the conspiracy in his own register: “so hot, it’s on fire.” The first season followed one powerful family. The premise of the second suggests a bigger target, institutions that can lose a prisoner and keep a straight face, and a protagonist with even fewer resources than the people he is chasing.

Nobody outside the production has seen the new episodes yet, so what the season does with that setup is still an open question. What the synopsis does make clear is the structure: a public case that keeps getting bigger and a private one that keeps getting closer. The case pulls Lee away from his daughter Francis, who wants more time with him, and he recruits his friend Johnny to help. Then the man he declared dead arrives.

Tommy Lee Jones as the father Lee called dead

FX describes Lee Raybon Sr. as an estranged grifter. Disney+ gives him a nickname, Frog, and adds the line that carries the whole season’s promise: father and son are more alike than either wants to admit. Francis, played again by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, is eager to get to know the grandfather she was told did not exist. For a character whose entire public identity is built on refusing to let a lie stand, that is an uncomfortable inheritance to have show up in person.

The casting came from a simple question, Hawke has said. He and Harjo tried to imagine “who would be a great, formidable figure in Lee Raybon’s life, and Tommy Lee popped up in our mind.” Hawke added that Jones “was a fan of The Lowdown and was a fan of Reservation Dogs.”

Betty Gilpin’s public defender and the returning Tulsa crew

Gilpin’s Ginger is the engine of the public plot. FX calls her a public defender who is impressed by Lee’s award speech, which says something about how she reads people, or about how desperate her case is. A public defender asking a self-published muckraker for help finding a client the state cannot account for is the kind of premise this series was built for: official channels have failed, so the job falls to a man who runs a rare-books store.

Around them, the first season’s Tulsa returns with new jobs. Keith David’s Marty is now managing editor of The Heartland Press, the outlet that carried Lee’s award-winning story. Rafael Casal plays Johnny, the jujitsu-trained dentist Lee leans on for help. Kaniehtiio Horn returns as Samantha, Lee’s ex. Harjo again writes and directs, and the executive producers include Hawke, Garrett Basch, Ryan Hawke, Duffy Boudreau and Scott Teems, with FX Productions behind it.

A real Tulsa reporter behind the fiction

The Lowdown is fiction, but it has a real starting point. The Tulsa Flyer reports that the series is inspired by the life of the late citizen journalist Lee Roy Chapman. Lee Raybon is not Chapman, and the show does not present itself as his biography; it borrows the type, the independent local reporter working outside any newsroom, and builds a crime story around him.

That choice is the series’ sharpest idea. The independent reporter with a small outlet and no legal department is a figure readers recognize well beyond Oklahoma, and the premise uses him for comedy and for danger at the same time: a man underqualified for the fights he picks, picking them with people who have far more to lose. Season 2’s move from one family to a prison system and a sheriff’s office takes that premise to its logical next step.

The production stayed home. FX announced the renewal on January 7, 2026, and the new season was filmed in Tulsa, where the first season shot at places such as the Philbrook Museum of Art and Magic City Books. “Love this story, and I love this city,” Harjo told the Flyer.

Where The Lowdown sits in the FX tradition

FX has built a recognizable shelf of regional crime stories with a sense of humor: Fargo in Minnesota and North Dakota, Justified in Kentucky, and Harjo’s own Reservation Dogs in rural Oklahoma. The Lowdown belongs to that line, and its premise echoes the shambling-detective comedy of The Big Lebowski, where the investigator is the least composed person in the story. The first season earned a place among the American Film Institute’s television honorees for 2025.

A second season changes the contract with the audience. The first sold the surprise of the character; the second has to justify his return. Hawke has been open about that pressure. “I’ve never had a season two of anything in my life,” he told ABC7, calling the experience “a little bit daunting in that you can have the second album jitters.” Harjo framed it as escalation: “The second season, the stakes just get higher,” he said, describing “a bit of a pressure cooker around Ethan’s character, Lee.”

The question underneath all of it is the one the synopsis plants and no premiere can settle. Lee Raybon’s whole method rests on the idea that a true story, once printed, puts things right. His award says the city agrees. Now the person who knows his oldest lie is in town, and his daughter wants to hear the old man’s version. What does a truth-teller owe the people he has been protecting from the truth, and what happens when they decide to go looking for it themselves?

The Lowdown season 2: release date, episodes and where to watch

When does it premiere? Season 2 premieres on Wednesday, October 14, 2026, with two episodes at 9 p.m. ET on FX, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ in the US. Disney+ carries the season in other markets; some territories, such as Canada, list the premiere the following day.

How many episodes? Eight, with new episodes weekly on Wednesdays after the two-episode premiere.

Who is in the cast? Ethan Hawke, Tommy Lee Jones, Betty Gilpin, Keith David, Rafael Casal, Kaniehtiio Horn and Ryan Kiera Armstrong.

Is The Lowdown a true story? No. It is fiction inspired by the life of the late Tulsa citizen journalist Lee Roy Chapman.

Do I need to watch season 1? It helps. The new season picks up after Lee’s reporting on Dale Washberg’s death, and all eight first-season episodes are on Hulu and Disney+.