The Devil’s Mama
Season 1
Episode 2
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
For as determined and generous as Lee has proven to be in his pursuit of the truth, he’s also revealing himself to be an idiot.
Photo: Copyright 2025, FX. All rights reserved
The Bank of Lee is open. He’s spending the late Bertie’s money like, well, it’s another man’s money. Lee gives a mini-mart cashier watching makeup tutorials a grand to hide the bruises on his busted-open face before he has to go face his ex-wife. He gives his ex-wife the child-support money he owes her — plus interest — without bothering to come up with a plausible cover story for where it came from. Lee gives Deidra’s cousin’s cousin a hundred bucks just for being on the sidewalk at the right time. The world is made up of “spend it” people and “save it” people, but the “spend it” people make for much better TV.
There are no rules — at least not yet — that govern the shape of an episode of The Lowdown. We just follow Lee. And Lee is like one of those chattering teeth toys, the kind that bounces itself in every direction until something gets in its way or it tips off the edge of the table. Lee doesn’t go home to take a shower before meeting Francis and her mom in the park. Instead, he leaves his bloody hair in a gas-station bathroom sink. He hides his black eyes behind 2010s Kardashian-level contouring, oversize white diamanté sunglasses, and a trucker hat. Which is to say, he looks totally unfit for a weekend of fatherhood.
“I don’t read the calendar, and I never will,” Lee tells his ex, who has just reminded him that she’s going away with her boyfriend for the weekend. His audacity tells us everything we need to know about what it must have been like to be Mrs. Lee Raybon on a daily basis. So I’m glad Samantha (Reservation Dogs alum Kaniehtiio Horn) has uncool Johnny, who does jiujitsu and plans mini-breaks to Eureka Springs. I bet he drives an Audi, and I bet he vacuums the inside of the cup holders with the crevice attachment. Meanwhile, Lee just picked up his daughter in a dead man’s sedan. Soon, he’ll park her at Hoot Owl Books with Deidra because, like Lee himself, the relentless quest for the truth doesn’t rest for the child-custody rota. The truth would like to switch weekends.
But first, loose ends must be tied and debts settled. Lee pays Deidra what he owes her, plus more for babysitting Francis. He pays out his security guard, Waylon, despite Waylon’s complete failure to provide Lee security from assault and abduction. The rest of the cash, along with a first edition of Mein Kampf from Blackie’s glove compartment, Lee entrusts to his lawyer, Dan, to whom he also owes money. As for Blackie’s car, Lee tells Waylon and Waylon’s cousin Henry to make it disappear. You can’t witness a double homicide from a trunk that doesn’t exist, I guess. This is when Lee really should pass out for a few hours to recover, but he can’t stop moving, even as his body tries to give out on him. He stumbles through doorways; his torso seems to take the shape of a chair against his will.
Despite being half-dead, it doesn’t take long for Lee to find a promising lead. A call to Frank’s development firm to find Allen turns out to be a dead end, but Lee wasn’t the skinheads’ only victim last night. Before they came for Lee, they vandalized the offices of Tulsa Beat, the paper that published their names and headshots alongside Lee’s latest article. His publisher, Cyrus (Killer Mike), is more baffled than concerned by Lee’s saga, because he gave Lee a gun to protect himself in the pilot: “How does an adult with a gun get put in a trunk?”
Cyrus takes 800 bucks from Blackie’s slush fund for his broken windows and declares that he’s done buying Lee’s dangerous stories. But an obsession with the truth is at the heart of every newspaperman, even a cynic like Cyrus. He gives Lee the address for Blackie’s mom, Bonnie, a Tulsa Beat reader who will not be renewing her subscription after what the paper printed about her baby boy, even if he is a Nazi.
Her missing baby-boy Nazi, that is; Blackie hasn’t answered her calls all morning. Lee poses as an old prison friend called Johnny to win Bonnie’s trust, and he looks the part: Confederate-flag tattoo, battered face, and an Aryan Brotherhood hat he picked up off Dale Washberg’s lawn last episode. Dale Dickey has been playing put-upon redneck mothers for decades, and she’s perfected the ratio of uneasy fidgeting to icy silences. She’s worried for her son but doesn’t know how to help “Johnny” find him. Luckily, she’s hooking up with Blackie’s friend, Phil, and Phil’s a talker. Phil tells Johnny that Blackie met Allen in lockup, too, and Allen is bad news. He’s “old-school” Aryan Brotherhood, by which I think he must mean “blood in, blood out.” Phil confirms that Blackie and Berta work for Allen and that recently, they messed up a job in Skiatook, which happens to be where Dale Washberg lives.
In episode one, when Lee walks into Dale’s house for the estate sale, he straightens a family portrait hanging askew on the wall. This episode, we learn how it got that way: the force of Don fucking Betty Jo in his dead brother’s bed. The Washbergs are a mess. Betty Jo, lonelier than ever without Dale, wants more from Don; Don’s wife, Mary-Ann, catches them in bed. Pearl, Dale’s adult daughter, vacillates between disbelieving that her father committed suicide and blaming her mother for it.
But on the day of Dale’s memorial, everyone brushes their hair, puts on the right clothes, and plays big, grieving family. The pews are a veritable who’s who of the characters we’ve already met. Frank’s there because rich and powerful men always know each other. And so is Marty, who turns out to be Don’s private investigator. Don hired Marty to follow Lee after Lee published a Washberg family takedown in the Heartland Press. By coincidence, Marty had been an admirer of Lee’s work until he had the misfortune of meeting the grump at Sweet Emily’s. Even the cops that harass Lee on the street are in attendance at the memorial–cum–gubernorial campaign stop.
Lee just about behaves himself throughout the church service, but at the reception, he tails Don into the bathroom, ironically to confront Don about hiring a PI to tail him. Don does not want to be harassed at his brother’s funeral, and the situation escalates to the point of fisticuffs very quickly. “A vote for Donald Washberg is a vote for white supremacy,” Lee shouts into the gathering of likely Washberg voters. It’s more of a hunch than a fact. He also accuses Don of being a CEO Christian, which might be the more damning allegation with some demos of the Oklahoma electorate. As Marty pulls him out of the reception before the cops do, Lee starts reciting the epic abolitionist poem “John Brown’s Body” at the top of his lungs. Lee’s not just obnoxiously grandstanding; he’s erudite.
He’s also kind of an idiot. He yells before he thinks. He entrusts two bozos to get rid of the evidence of the crime he witnessed; instead, Waylon and Henry film a music video in front of the burning car and upload it to YouTube. Lee lies to his perceptive daughter about his van being in the shop and then shows up driving it, which only makes her worry about him more. Lee may be the flashlight that Tulsa needs, but he’s also a battering ram: obstinate and destructive.
For almost no reason at all — just a combination of stress, exhaustion, and smugness — he makes an enemy of Marty, who rescued him. “I work to expose the man, and you work for the man,” Lee spits in his face because he doesn’t immediately believe Lee’s claim that Donald Washberg is a Nazi. There are two Black central characters on this show — Cyrus and Marty — and both mention Lee’s race to him more than once. In the pilot, Marty says there’s nothing sadder than a white man who cares, but by the end of episode two, he’s calling Lee a “self-righteous cracker.”
The show’s preoccupation with Lee’s race isn’t incidental. He’s a white man driving a white van who doesn’t understand why he’s earned the nickname “pedo”; hours after sipping sweet tea with Blackie’s family, he’s lecturing to a Black man he barely knows about how to relate to “the man.” It’s a lack of self-awareness that’s hard to square with Lee’s better qualities: his drive, his generosity, his love for this broken city. Right now, I don’t really care if Dale Washberg killed himself or if his wife did it or if his brother and his wife did it together. So far, the mystery that’s driving The Lowdown is Lee.
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