Shows Like
Shows Like The Lowdown for Slow-Burn Mysteries
By Jordan A. · · 4 min read
The Lowdown comes back to FX on October 14, with the Hulu drop a day later, and Ethan Hawke is once again playing Lee Raybon, the Tulsa bookseller who cannot leave a mystery alone. Season 2 sends him after a man who vanishes while locked up, the kind of thread that looks small until it starts pulling a whole city apart. If you love a mystery that takes its time, you are in the right place.
The show comes from Sterlin Harjo, who made Reservation Dogs, and it carries the same gift for place and voice. Raybon calls himself a truthstorian, a self-styled citizen journalist who digs into Tulsa's buried history whether anyone asked him to or not. That is the real engine here, a neo-noir powered by curiosity instead of a badge.
What sets this show apart is texture. It is less interested in the twist than in the person chasing it, a stubborn amateur who treats the truth like a debt he owes. The series below live in that same register, where the mood and the characters matter as much as the solution, and almost all of them are waiting for you right now. A couple of them are limited series you can finish in a weekend, and a couple will eat a whole month, so pick based on how much road you want ahead of you.
Slow Horses is the gold standard
If you have not met the misfits of Slough House, fix that. Slow Horses on Apple TV follows disgraced British spies parked in a dead-end department, run by Gary Oldman's gloriously disgusting Jackson Lamb. Like The Lowdown, it is a slow burn that rewards patience, built on sharp dialogue and people who are smarter than their circumstances. The plots tighten by the episode, and the cast makes failure look weirdly heroic. We go deeper on it in our rundown of shows like Slow Horses if you want to keep pulling that thread.
Poker Face turns the format inside out
Natasha Lyonne's Poker Face on Peacock is a case-of-the-week mystery with a twist baked into the structure. Her character can tell when anyone is lying, so you watch the crime happen first, then watch her unravel it. It shares The Lowdown's scrappy, lived-in Americana and its love of oddball side characters. Rian Johnson built it as a throwback to Columbo, right down to the rotating roster of famous guest stars who turn up each week as the person Lyonne's Charlie Cale has to outsmart. A second season widened the road trip without losing the formula, so there is plenty to work through, and that comfort-food rhythm makes it perfect for a weeknight you do not want to think too hard about.
Mare of Easttown is the heavier cousin
When you want the mystery to hurt a little, go to Mare of Easttown on HBO Max. Kate Winslet plays a small-town Pennsylvania detective buried under grief and a case that will not close, and the show treats the community as carefully as the crime. It is a limited series, so you get a complete story in seven episodes, which makes it an easy weekend commitment. The sense of place is so strong you can practically smell the hoagies, and that rootedness is exactly what The Lowdown does with Tulsa.
Bosch gives you the long haul
If you finish a show and immediately miss it, Bosch is your answer. The Prime Video series ran for seven seasons before spinning off into Bosch: Legacy, following a Los Angeles homicide detective who works by one rule: everybody counts or nobody counts. It is procedural comfort done right, methodical and unglamorous, with a lead who is as stubborn as Lee Raybon and twice as weathered. Titus Welliver plays Harry Bosch like a man who has seen the worst of a city and keeps showing up anyway, and the cases pull from Michael Connelly's long run of novels, so the writing stays grounded. There is more than enough here to carry you through a long winter.
True Detective still casts a long shadow
No slow-burn list is complete without True Detective on HBO Max. The first season, with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson tracing a case across seventeen years of Louisiana rot, basically wrote the modern template for the mood The Lowdown is working in. It is dense, atmospheric, and occasionally pretentious in the best way. For more anthology crime in that vein, our list of shows like True Detective points you toward the ones that actually earn the comparison.
A couple more for the pile
Still hungry after those? Two quick picks round things out:
- Only Murders in the Building on Hulu, if you want the amateur-sleuth energy with jokes, which we cover in our guide to shows like Only Murders in the Building.
- Reservation Dogs on Hulu, from The Lowdown's own creator Sterlin Harjo, for the same warm, funny, deeply specific sense of Oklahoma life, minus the body count.
The common thread is patience. These are shows that trust you to sit with a place and its people long enough for the mystery to mean something, instead of racing you to the reveal. That is the whole appeal of The Lowdown, and it is a mood worth chasing. If you would rather skip the browsing and get straight to the match, BingeNext checks what is on all your services and hands you the next slow burn without the endless scroll. Get TV recommendations and settle in.
Topics covered: the lowdown, slow-burn mysteries, ethan hawke, neo-noir, crime dramas
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and is responsible for every guide published on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu. Dates, season counts and where-to-watch details in these guides are checked against official sources before publishing, and corrections are welcome at Jordan@Bingenext.com.