While writing my interview with the costume and production designers of FX’s The Lowdown, I spent a lot of time thinking about the compromises which must be achieved between the clothing actors will wear and the spaces those actors will inhabit. Costumes cannot be successful if they are fighting a set for attention, and a private interior space, like all the homes (and especially the bedrooms) we see in this series, they have to fit the unique style of the character living in them. We have to believe that the person we’re watching on screen would actually cultivate a very specific space.
Without collaborative work, without clear communication united under a cohesive vision for the project as a whole, suspension of disbelief would be impossible. We, the audience, might not consciously understand why things seem off, but we would notice none the less. The Lowdown is an exemplary model of how to successfully manage all of these considerations. I could tell the people who worked on it liked and respected each other long before I had this conversation; and my theory about that absolutely proved true. Part of the reason this series tells its (many, intertwined) stories so well is because of the relationships built by the crew in Oklahoma, previously not the first state one would think of for a star-studded Hollywood production. But during the filming of Reservation Dogs, and party because of other productions filmed there, like Fancy Dance, the state has become the location of many lauded productions.
“In the Tulsa community,” costume designer Alyssa Blair told me, “we don’t have any prop houses or costume shops or rental places we can go to. It’s so crazy. So, everything is coming from thrift stores or people that we know, we’re reaching out on Facebook marketplace. Or, using those resources that we’ve built for years in the Tulsa community.”
“I think for both of us,” said Brandon Tonner-Connolly, The Lowdown’s production designer, “when we were prepping the show, we talked a lot about making sure that it had a really specific sense of place. It was a really specific, unique world that we were building. And the characters are so closely inspired by Tulsa, the city, and by the people in the city. For me, and it’s something that we also did in Reservation Dogs, working with the community, working with the local vendors and working with people whose stories we are actually telling. Whose stories we’ve been entrusted to tell.”
I asked if they would talk to me about production, how working in Tulsa, and working with Tulsa, was different from a production in a bigger city, one with more traditional filmmaking infrastructure.
“Those local resources are what create this really specific sense of place,” Tonner-Connolly explained, “and this really unique world that you wouldn’t get on any other show, if you were using prop houses, or the typical resources in New York or LA or something along those lines. Working with the community is a matter of necessity, but it’s a beautiful gift too, because it allows us to step outside the traditional sourcing and step into all these amazing pieces of set dressing, art and costumes. Everything that we wouldn’t normally be pushed to do or to have access to. I think everyone in set deck is tired of me saying, ‘keep it specific.’ But also, we were trying to make things harder for ourselves, basically, because we wanted to do it in a different way.”
There are many things about this series which make it stand out, in a positive way, when compared to others. Surprising exactly no one, Cyrus (Michael ‘Killer Mike’ Render), with all his beautiful shirts and somehow-NOT-kitschy matching eye patches, mesmerised me. I loved every single one (and immediately began fantasizing about a conversation with Killer Mike and El-P about how clothes help tell stories. RTJ Forever, btw).
“It was scripted that he has an eye patch on,” Blair told me. “And, we talked with props early on, we were playing around with it some, like, do we bedazzle it? Do we do something crazy? And then I had the idea that we match it to his shirt, it was an idea in pre-production. It was really funny, because, then, Killer Mike, scheduling wise, on the pilot; we wound up having to fit him the morning of, which is always a challenge. And we were all so nervous. But he’s such an incredible, imposing force, and he’s just the sweetest guy ever.”
“But I had sold Sterlin on this matching eye patch thing,” the costume designer continued. “And then we didn’t even know what he was gonna wear until about 30 minutes before he went on set. We had our tailor in the back of the truck, making a custom eye patch. We just ran with it after that. And we did it, every time we see him, it’s matching.”
While I was watching the show, I thought a lot about the overlaps between Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) and Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), because the similarities were there on screen so often. It was obvious that the show had an opinion about the overlaps between the two main male characters, who in this case happen to be filling the archetypal roles of the detective (sort of?) and the deceased.
“We did talk about, costume wise, doing a through line between Lee and Dale,” Blair said. “The original title of the show was The Sensitive Kind. And that’s now the title of Chapter One of the first season. Sterlin and I spoke a lot about them both being the sensitive kind, how it manifested in different ways. So we tried to do costume through lines; they both wear Stetson Open Road hats, just in a different color, shaped differently, with little flourishes. Maybe they shopped at the same vintage shops years ago in Tulsa, things like that.”
“I love the costumes connection for that,” Tonner-Connolly said. “And the through line between the two of them.”
I needed to know more about the hats. There’s a rather impressive hat flip in the opening scene, (which by the way, is so riddled with cues and clues that it took me 45 minutes of pausing and rewatching to feel close to having caught most of them) and hearing the designers talk about it made that first (literal) hat trick feel like a ‘wink’ from production to the audience. If it is not clear, lovely reader, I live for those moments.
“The hat,” Blair said, “it’s so funny, because usually, I’ve had to have conversations with the department head of hair on the pilot and the season multiple times. Typically, if a character is wearing a hat, I have a breakdown of when they would have the hat on, and when they would have it off. And for this, it was all up to Ethan, truly. But he and I talked really early on in the pilot about wanting to use it intentionally and about him using it as a prop or a tool. I wish I could take credit,” the costume designer said with a laugh, “all of those nuances, they are truly Ethan Hawke.”
Lee Raybon, Hawke’s character in this series, he’s based, sort-of, like an homage, on a real person, Lee Roy Chapman, a real public historian from Tulsa, who passed away in 2015.
“The sunglasses are truly Lee Roy Chapman,” Blair explained, “he was always seen in those. They’re really like gas station sunglasses, you know, cheap Ray Ban knockoffs. That was one thing that I know Sterlin really wanted. I feel like Lee Roy was never seen without them. That was something that we worked with props, again, like right out the gate, about having those cheap sunglasses. And to me, it’s funny, the styling of that is not something that I think you would normally do. But because he is loosely inspired by a real person, it works, and I think there’s some comedy in it too.”
It felt impossible to not ask about Marty Brunner (Keith David) immediately after Lee; very seriously, I need this show to get a second season, I need to see Marty and Lee in more of an equal partners situation. I wanted to make a point of looking at the character in the space we see him most often, the cafe, Sweet Emily’s.
“Originally,” Tonner-Connolly explained, “Sterlin had laid out this real geography for all the main spaces. For the bookstore, the tax law office, the record store and Sweet Emily’s, we knew that we wanted this to be a real world and that meant we had to find real spaces, not cloister everything away on a soundstage. We scouted and eventually found this one derelict block with all these different spaces, that were all ripped up inside. None of them had power and none of them had water. But we knew that we could make it into our own little backlot.”
“We wanted Sweet Emily’s to be a space where Marty and Lee, and everybody else, can be in, and a space where the costumes can synchronize as well,” the production designer continued. “I thought about the colors, the red countertop, the red checkered floor, the low pile carpet in the dining room, and keeping those things a little bit more muted, a little darker so that we can show off the age, show the stains on the carpet from the last like, 30 years of breakfast. Sweet Emily’s was the real anchor of the space. And we knew, right outside, you’ll have this beautiful view of the Tulsa skyline down the block. As with everything, we wanted to give it the texture of Tulsa, a place where the Midwest and the South intersect. There’s a lot of direct sunlight in the summer. Everything really has this great texture and lived-in quality. So we took all of that and wanted to give it to this diner space, where it feels like it’s been there for a long time. We want the color palette to collapse, like the past and the present together.”
Understanding our character’s favorite haunt, considering all the points Tonner-Connolly was making about the cafe, and how this was all information which would absolutely affect the costumes, I asked about the character and his wardrobe.
“He’s definitely our noir,” Blair told me. “Early on, we talked a lot about this being a neo-noir. And for me, from a costume standpoint, I’m like, ‘oh, trench coat’. And anytime I can be campy, I’m gonna do it. A lot of our work on Reservation Dogs was the same way. But, I thought, Marty being this sort of conundrum of a character, this poet, I was like, ‘this is where we can get the camp’. And this is where we can get the noir in from the costume world. We worked with a local leather-maker and custom made him the trench, and then absolutely beat the crap out of it.”
“We aged it, made it look 1000 years old, stained it,” the costume designer explained. “I wanted Marty to feel like a little bit of a product of yesteryear. He wears a lot of pieces that are mixed decades; he wears a pleated khaki, with the suede trench coat, with the paper boy hat. We’ve made jokes, like Marty was born wearing that hat and coat, he’s been this distinguished gentleman his entire life. We wanted his clothes to really feel worn in, but not as much as Lee’s. Lee feels dirty, and he looks dirty. Whereas Marty, we just wanted them to feel old and lived in, which I feel is how Keith David plays this character, and I wanted to speak to that. Keith has such incredible personal style, I love to lean into it. He’ll show up in these incredible glasses or pieces of jewelry. And we’re like, ‘leave it on, keep that on today, if you don’t mind’. And he loves to get to do that. I wanted him to feel like a professional private investigator. That was the difference; we want Lee to look gross. Ethan and I have said since the beginning that we wanted people to be able to smell Lee, and I think that comes across. Whereas Marty, I think Marty smells good.”
I could imagine a nearly infinite number of potential problems or issues, endless places where things could, aesthetically, be knocked off course.
“Even on Reservation Dogs,” Tonner-Connolly told me, “we’d aspire to have weekly tone meetings where we can get together and talk about, what’s happening in my world, what’s going on in your world, you know, the sets and locations, what are the characters and things? Are we still on the same page? should we adjust this? Just to make sure that we’re both still in sync and synchronized, we’re constantly talking to each other. discussing it and making sure that we’re on the same page and that, yeah, it’s all in the same great world.”
We do collaborate a lot,” Blair said, “and both of our departments, they’re both out in the world. They’ll send each other links and send each other pictures. Like, ‘Hey, do you want me to pick this thing up?’ And that is truly a gift, we don’t get that a lot of the time. I feel like in productions where our departments are working so closely together and we’re all on each other’s team, like we want to make the best product and, you know, we’re really passionate about making it look good. And we know that costumes and, and, and art and set deck has to be in sync for that. And, getting to work together for years, and we’ve all been working together for years now, is super special.”
“The cop party in general was such an incredible undertaking. It was so funny, because that was the end of an episode. Macon Blair was directing that block, and Macon is really amazing and also has such a great sense of those types of shots or in capturing those types of moments.”
Tonner-Connolly described the meetings in preparation for the scene, the supportive nature of a team willing to consider some petty wild ideas for what exactly local law enforcement, many of whom seem to have rather slippery morals, would choose to do when the cops felt safe to cut loose.
“We had many meetings where it was just like, ‘so what if somebody had a car from the impound lot, and somebody was just beating on it with a sledgehammer’,” said the production designer. “So, that was fun to prepare for, because I felt like you could just suggest any crazy idea that came into your mind. It required so much coordination, because it was a one shot.”
“We had to walk it through 1000 times,” Tonner-Connolly continued, “with camera,without camera, with Ethan, without Ethan, just to make sure that all the prop moments were right, that all the spacings were right, that we had set up all the different pieces; the barbecue outside the shooting range, the explosions across the way. All of that had to be pretty perfectly timed and synchronized. So a lot of preparation, and then a lot of fun moments inside thinking about crazy things that cops could be doing on their off time.”
Preparations complete, I wanted to know more, what it took to capture the moments on screen I enjoyed watching so much.
“When the moment finally came to shoot it, Tonner-Connolly told me, it was late on a Friday night. I think it was the end of the week and we didn’t really get to the first take until like 9pm, 10pm, we had to wait until it was dark, did a bunch of run throughs. Then, to finally have this moment where they did the one shot, walked Lee all the way through the house, had everything go up flawlessly, the explosions go off, and then he gets to the gazebo at the end. And everyone had hit their marks. It was great, like a relief and a really triumphant moment.”
It sounded almost exactly like a Rube Goldberg machine.
“Yes, that’s exactly what it felt like,” Blair said with a laugh. “Costume wise, we did want to put Donald Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan) in white, because I knew it would be dark and all of the Tulsa police are in dark blue. And I knew Ethan would have his jean jacket, on and we were thinking about what we could do that would pop. This is a production thing, but one that affected all of us, is that we did not have Kyle McLaughlin until the end of shooting. So, for his first fitting, we had to fit him for 23 costumes, for the entire season.”
I asked the costume designer about this specific scene because the color choices intrigued me; this is a very intelligent piece of storytelling, and here it was, giving all the traditional Western cues, but things felt flipped, because this time, it appeared that the bad guy (or is he the bad guy?) was wearing white, while our hero was, inexplicably, The Man In Black. Playing with expectations, with motifs and traditions, is one of many ways that The Lowdown is constantly subverting expectations to the benefit of the production.
“That initial shot where you see Kyle,” Blair said, “we always wanted Kyle to be so much bigger than Ethan. So, exaggerated shoulder pads and silhouetted. We built that gazebo and we had placed it down to the inch, we’d worked out with the director of photography and the shot wanted to end exactly here. And for the lighting to be precise and for the explosion to be precise, we’d built it down to the inch of where it needed to be. But we also designed it and built it in such a way that we can’t see his face until the end of the scene. We needed to be able to silhouette him, to backlight him and to have it be a thing where, at least in the first time that we see it, at the end of the party, but it takes time and work to look intentional and be stylish, to look the way they want it to.”
“With Kyle’s black hat in particular,” Blair said, “on the pilot, I made a decision that no one can wear a black hat ever except for him. And that includes background. I told my background customers to constantly pull black hats because we get local background talent in Oklahoma and they see the show and they see the mood boards of what to wear and they come dressed like cowboys a lot of the time. We were constantly pulling black hats off of people because when we meet him in the show, I think it does set him up to be the bad guy, and when we made the pilot, I wanted to play in again to the sort of Neo-Noir, and we get to do it a little bit, to play with the cliches. I did want to play into the like, oh, the black hat equals bad, you know, as elementary as that sounds. But then we, as the story progressed, as we got more and more scripts. You know, things change for Donald’s character a little bit. And they keep leveling up the bad guys.”
If we, the audience, a passive position by its nature, instinctively respond to what we see on screen, it is the result of a massive amount of work. It never just happens, that would be impossible, and when it happens successfully, it is because of the combined experience, abilities, and craftsmanship of humans who chose their work because of love. A love of storytelling can be shown in many different ways; how lucky we are to live in a timeline where projects like Sterlin Harjo’s, a filmmaker who wants to repeatedly work with people like Alyssa Blair and Brandon Tonner-Connolly, are funded. Very seriously, open a window for each series, Reservation Dogs and The Lowdown, on IMDB; look how many people worked on the crews of both projects.
Ian Fleming wrote that “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” That’s a lesson which a lot of the characters in this story could learn a lot from, but it’s not my point, here,I’d like to ask you to think about that quote as an analogy. See something once? Cool. Twice? It might be significant. Three times? The narrative, even if it is not using literal words, it is trying to communicate with you.
Sterlin Harjo is an exceptionally talented writer, showrunner, storyteller… I could go on. He’s giving us pieces of the story from the very first frame of the first episode of The Lowdown. It is not a coincidence that the costumes worn and spaces inhabited, all of them, are woven together, there is planning and more hours of labor behind every perfect scene. So when you’re watching this show, or any other, I highly recommend paying attention to patterns.
Sterlin Harjo’s latest series for FX, The Lowdown, is available now on Hulu. The final episode of the first season airs on Tuesday, November 4, 2025.