Escapist Routes #35

This week saw the launch of a new, highly anticipated, heavily hyped drama. I speak, of course, of All Her Fault, the new wine mom thriller starring Sarah Snook. Okay, fine, and Pluribus.

But we haven’t watched those yet! Come back next week, I guess? This week, we have The Lowdown, The Morning Show (sigh) and Down Cemetery Road.

The Lowdown, season 1

“There’s nothing worse than a white man who cares.”

The Lowdown is an eight-episode neo-noir series from the creator of Reservoir Dogs. It follows a shambolic citizen journalist (a self-styled “truthstorian”) played by Ethan Hawke as he stumbles through Tulsa, investigating the suicide of a wealthy landowner shortly after he published an article critical of the man’s family. His search brings him into contact with the dead man’s family (sexy widow Jeanne Tripplehorn, brother and gubernatorial candidate Kyle McLachlan) along with crooked property developers, beluga caviar forgers, white supremacists, and an antiques dealer who may or may not also be a witch.

I came to The Lowdown late — we started watching just a few days before the finale dropped — but it turns out to be one of my favourite shows of 2025. There’s a bit of Fargo in it, and a bit of Justified, if Justified’s cowboys read books, understood modern art and hated cops. I’ve never watched Reservation Dogs, but obviously we will be rectifying that, and I’m told these shows take place in the same universe, linked by an unobtrusive cameo in the first episode.

(We’re not specifically anti-sitcom in our household, but we struggle to incorporate half-hour shows into our routine — the only comedies we’ve watched since 2020 are Schitt’s Creek and We Are Lady Parts. So we’ve missed out on … a lot.)

When I was a teen, Ethan Hawke was the intellectual heartthrob for girls a bit older than me. He was the star of Gattaca, a film which totally befuddled everyone else at a slumber party I attended, and spent several years talking up his plans for a modern adaptation of Hamlet, which came and fizzled in 2000. Now he’s a grizzled character actor, but his work as Lee Raybon (based on a real “truthstorian” who was friends with creator Sterlin Harjo) draws on that early image.

The timing doesn’t work out for any direct inspiration to have taken place, but The Lowdown also reminded me of One Battle After Another, which is also a movie about a shambolic, semi-competent father out of his depth as he gets caught up in events beyond his control. But The Lowdown doesn’t have the confusing racial politics and misogynoir of that movie — just a deep concern for truth, respect and dignity.

There are a lot of layers to The Lowdown — it’s about racism, violence, the elaborate lengths to which white people will go to steal Indigenous land — but one thing that particularly struck me is that this is a series where ordinary people make and interact with art.

Lee runs a used bookstore and engages in a little light art theft; Marty, the private investigator engaged to keep an eye on him, aspires to write a book. Dale, the landowner whose death is the inciting incident, collected first edition crime novels and aspired to write fiction. A key character is Chutto, a Native American street artist. Even Lee’s thirteen-year-old daughter (played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who was also my favourite character in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew) gets up at a slam poetry event to share her writing.

The Lowdown doesn’t distinguish between high or low art, or even good or bad, it only draws a line between those who have some level of creativity in their heart, and those who seek only to destroy. The white supremacists and property developers are a metaphor for white supremacists and property developers, but their inability to innovate, or to even understand the Biblical verses they regurgitate, maybe they’re also a little bit ChatGPT.

The Morning Show, season 4, episode 8

Welcome to The Morning After The Morning Show, and I’m sorry, did we think this was the season finale?

I definitely had that in my head! But no, every season so far has been ten episodes long. We have two more weeks of this nightmare left.

God help us.

I think this was a good episode in a lot of respects? I simply don’t care anymore.

There were no Black people in it, did you notice?

I did! Felt ominous, frankly.

As ominous as Bradley taking off for Belarus?

Worse. The Belarusians can have her.

But Liz, You Know What They Do To Journalists.

I mean, is she even a journalist? Really? Were Reese and Jennifer even in the same room for any of their one scene together? Is Reese Witherspoon actually still in this show?

Shout out to the body doubles for their excellent work there.

Speaking of, I’m certain that this is just a side effect of weird make-up, lighting and possibly cosmetic surgery, but there were scenes where it felt like Jennifer Aniston’s face was superimposed over a double. It had the same uncanny floating look of Princess Leia at the end of Rogue One.

At this point, nothing would shock me.

It may not be that nefarious, though. I mean, obviously “is anyone in The Morning Show actually filming together” is a question I very much need answered, far more than anything happening in the plot, but my flatmate pointed out that Gary Oldman in Slow Horses is also often filmed separately to his scene partners. It’s just less obvious because the execution is more subtle, and because we’re sufficiently engaged in the story that we’re not paying close attention to camera angles and cuts.

Oh, interesting.

That has me wondering if AppleTV does this a lot — maybe how it gets so many high profile and very busy actors on board for shows with consistent (if not annual) release schedules.

Obviously now I’m going to be paying more attention in future, especially with the tentpole dramas.

But I also think that Reese Witherspoon is hugely over-committed — she has a massive amount of projects going at all times — and maybe she needs to just bite the bullet and step back from The Morning Show? She is meant to be a co-protagonist. And heaven knows that I don’t want a single minute more of Bradley Jackson on my screen, but also the show is suffering for not having a solid lead.

Instead we have the Cory and Celine Show.

Right, and that’s actually very good, but also I don’t care.

And the root of Alex’s daddy issues.

Which are mildly interesting, but all through Alex’s big scene, I was just distracted by Jennifer Aniston’s face and Jeremy Irons’ many accents.

Also, Bro Hartman is a dick, but that doesn’t change the fact that Alex spent the season flirting with a subordinate, slept with him, and immediately ghosted him, and that is a bad look when you flip the genders and also when you don’t flip the genders. Executives shouldn’t sleep with employees.

I actually don’t think the show is going to let Alex girlboss her way out of this, but at the same time, I kind of feel like the show hates women, and so the consequences she experiences will be disproportionate.

Which is, at least, realistic.

Yeah, the show about breakfast television being the most important part of the media landscape is known for its realism.

Anyway, if you were wondering, most of Gary Oldman’s scenes with Kristin Scott Thomas and Saskia Reeves are filmed with them actually together. Everyone else could go either way.

Scheduling? Personality conflicts? Or maybe he went full method and no one else can stand the smell?

Your guess is as good as mine!

Down Cemetery Road, season 1, episodes 1-3

This is an AppleTV+ series, so I’ll get the big question out of the way first: yes, it looks like Ruth Wilson and Emma Thompson were really filming together. See? It can happen!

Anyway, Down Cemetery Road is an adaptation of Mick “author of Slow Horses” Herron’s first novel, showrun by one of the writers of Slow Horses. They have less in common than I expected, but enough that I remarked to my flatmate that if Slow Horses is Dad TV, Down Cemetery Road is Mum TV. That’s incredibly reductive and binary, but ALSO it’s a vibe and I stand by it.

We follow Sarah (Ruth Wilson), an art restorer in Oxford whose peaceful life of cycling around the university town, identifying women’s art misattributed to men, and hosting dinner parties for her awful husband’s awful friends is disrupted when the house down the street explodes. The only survivor is a little girl, and Sarah becomes obsessed with her wellbeing. This leads her to private investigator Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson) — actually, no, first it leads her to private investigator Joe Silverman, Zoe’s somewhat estranged husband, but he is killed in the first episode. Which means Zoe has a strong motivation to help a rather neurotic suburban* woman she doesn’t much care for.

(* Does South Oxford count as “the suburbs”? I don’t really understand how the concept applies outside Australia. But that’s the vibe.)

“The tone is very odd,” my flatmate remarked as the credits ran over the first episode, and I agreed — were we meant to be laughing at Sarah or scared for her? Is she a competent professional adult or neurotic and desperate? Is Zoë the least convincing depiction of a heterosexual woman since Jack in Mass Effect? The cartoonishly evil/posh security services felt like a broad satire, a rough first draft of what would become Slow Horses. Sarah’s best friend Wigwam (no, I know) is every stereotype of a hippyish social worker come to life.

But it settled down in episodes 2 and 3, especially as the focus moved from Sarah to Zoë, who is not quite “what if Jackson Lamb was a woman” — but it’s much easier for women to be perceived as offensive, off-putting and gross. Zoë loved her husband and converted to Judaism to marry him (“but not for him”), but was sleeping with someone else; she has a fraught but respectful relationship with her mother-in-law; she’s deeply cynical, but also sincerely curious. And she has a cat.

Frankly, I love her. Even though everything about her styling says “I figured out I was a lesbian when I was fifty and decided to make it everyone else’s problem,” and yet?

And I am not usually on the “this female character has short hair and therefore must be gay” train! I’m usually on the opposite “actually until the last decade or so, there was a much wider range of ‘acceptable’ presentation styles for straight women, and maybe we should ask why that has changed” train! (It’s a very specific train.)

I have also come to like Sarah, who eventually comes to feel less like an assemblage of quirks and more like a complicated person who has been put in a simplistic box for too long. (I understand that she is a housewife in the novel; here, she has the sort of low-paid job in the arts that mostly go to women who are either independently wealthy or whose husbands have highly paid jobs. It’s a form of genteel exploitation.)

Three eps in, we know that the explosion was a botched attempt by MI5 (or the military?) to take out a former army officer who was part of some sort of experiment; one of the two assassins is dead; Sarah has been kidnapped by another former soldier from the explosion target’s unit; her husband is having an affair; the missing child is fine but being used as bait; and the security services (or whoever) make Slough House look like a crack team of competent humans. It probably didn’t need to be this complicated, but I’m sold.