Reservation Dogs<\/a> 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\u2019s sedan. Soon, he\u2019ll park her at Hoot Owl Books with Deidra because, like Lee himself, the relentless quest for the truth doesn\u2019t rest for the child-custody rota. The truth would like to switch weekends.<\/p>\nBut 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\u2019s 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\u2019s glove compartment, Lee entrusts to his lawyer, Dan, to whom he also owes money. As for Blackie\u2019s car, Lee tells Waylon and Waylon\u2019s cousin Henry to make it disappear. You can\u2019t witness a double homicide from a trunk that doesn\u2019t exist, I guess. This is when Lee really should pass out for a few hours to recover, but he can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Despite being half-dead, it doesn\u2019t take long for Lee to find a promising lead. A call to Frank\u2019s development firm to find Allen turns out to be a dead end, but Lee wasn\u2019t the skinheads\u2019 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\u2019s latest article. His publisher, Cyrus (Killer Mike), is more baffled than concerned by Lee\u2019s saga, because he gave Lee a gun to protect himself in the pilot: \u201cHow does an adult with a gun get put in a trunk?\u201d<\/p>\n
Cyrus takes 800 bucks from Blackie\u2019s slush fund for his broken windows and declares that he\u2019s done buying Lee\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Her missing baby-boy Nazi, that is; Blackie hasn\u2019t answered her calls all morning. Lee poses as an old prison friend called Johnny to win Bonnie\u2019s trust, and he looks the part: Confederate-flag tattoo, battered face, and an Aryan Brotherhood hat he picked up off Dale Washberg\u2019s lawn last episode. Dale Dickey has been playing put-upon redneck mothers for decades, and she\u2019s perfected the ratio of uneasy fidgeting to icy silences. She\u2019s worried for her son but doesn\u2019t know how to help \u201cJohnny\u201d find him. Luckily, she\u2019s hooking up with Blackie\u2019s friend, Phil, and Phil\u2019s a talker. Phil tells Johnny that Blackie met Allen in lockup, too, and Allen is bad news. He\u2019s \u201cold-school\u201d Aryan Brotherhood, by which I think he must mean \u201cblood in, blood out.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In episode one, when Lee walks into Dale\u2019s 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\u2019s bed. The Washbergs are a mess. Betty Jo, lonelier than ever without Dale, wants more from Don; Don\u2019s wife, Mary-Ann, catches them in bed. Pearl, Dale\u2019s adult daughter, vacillates between disbelieving that her father committed suicide and blaming her mother for it.<\/p>\n
But on the day of Dale\u2019s memorial, everyone brushes their hair, puts on the right clothes, and plays big, grieving family. The pews are a veritable who\u2019s who of the characters we\u2019ve already met. Frank\u2019s there because rich and powerful men always know each other. And so is Marty, who turns out to be Don\u2019s 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\u2019s work until he had the misfortune of meeting the grump at Sweet Emily\u2019s. Even the cops that harass Lee on the street are in attendance at the memorial\u2013cum\u2013gubernorial campaign stop.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s funeral, and the situation escalates to the point of fisticuffs very quickly. \u201cA vote for Donald Washberg is a vote for white supremacy,\u201d Lee shouts into the gathering of likely Washberg voters. It\u2019s 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 \u201cJohn Brown\u2019s Body\u201d at the top of his lungs. Lee\u2019s not just obnoxiously grandstanding; he\u2019s erudite.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s 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\u2019s also a battering ram: obstinate and destructive.<\/p>\n
For almost no reason at all \u2014 just a combination of stress, exhaustion, and smugness \u2014 he makes an enemy of Marty, who rescued him. \u201cI work to expose the man, and you work for the man,\u201d Lee spits in his face because he doesn\u2019t immediately believe Lee\u2019s claim that Donald Washberg is a Nazi. There are two Black central characters on this show \u2014 Cyrus and Marty \u2014 and both mention Lee\u2019s race to him more than once. In the pilot, Marty says there\u2019s nothing sadder than a white man who cares, but by the end of episode two, he\u2019s calling Lee a \u201cself-righteous cracker.\u201d<\/p>\n
The show\u2019s preoccupation with Lee\u2019s race isn\u2019t incidental. He\u2019s a white man driving a white van who doesn\u2019t understand why he\u2019s earned the nickname \u201cpedo\u201d; hours after sipping sweet tea with Blackie\u2019s family, he\u2019s lecturing to a Black man he barely knows about how to relate to \u201cthe man.\u201d It\u2019s a lack of self-awareness that\u2019s hard to square with Lee\u2019s better qualities: his drive, his generosity, his love for this broken city. Right now, I don\u2019t 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\u2019s driving The Lowdown is Lee.<\/p>\n
VULTURE NEWSLETTER<\/p>\n
Keep up with all the drama of your favorite shows!<\/p>\n
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms<\/a> and Privacy Notice<\/a> and to receive email correspondence from us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Lowdown The Devil\u2019s Mama Season 1 Episode 2 Editor\u2019s Rating 4 stars **** For as determined and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,20102,6622,85,46,8930,3169,29165,411,8929],"class_list":{"0":"post-34998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-fx","10":"tag-hulu","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-overnights","14":"tag-recaps","15":"tag-the-lowdown","16":"tag-tv","17":"tag-tv-recaps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/0bb4543c7ed163dbe04938a6ed2df64e58-The-Lowdown--episodes-2-.rsquare.w400.jpg\")
<\/p>\n