In his new FX series called “The Lowdown,” director Sterlin Harjo is intentional about appreciating the people of Tulsa and his home state of Oklahoma, the show’s co-producer shared with a Tulsa Regional Chamber audience Tuesday in the first of two strategic discussions.

“Sterlin’s mission that I try to uphold every single day is that we’re just trying to give back to the community that gave to us,” said Dylan Brodie, co-producer of “The Lowdown.” “For so many years, we never thought we could do this on this scale. Anything we can do to give back to our community in any aspect we will.”

Both “The Lowdown” and FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” a previous Harjo project, were filmed in and around Tulsa.

“On a big day on ‘The Lowdown,’ we will have almost 200 people on the call sheet, and about two-thirds of those people are from Oklahoma,” Brodie said. “We’ve also been able to promote local vendors. We’ve been slowly growing them over the years, so it’s not just people. Then on the cast front, we have so many local heroes, as well (actors such as Tulsa natives Jeanne Tripplehorn and Tim Blake Nelson).”

Brodie was a guest at the Chamber’s Joint Board of Directors and Board of Advisors Meeting at Southern Hills Country Club. He participated in a candid discussion about the television series with Meg Gould, executive director of the Tulsa Office of Film, Music, Arts & Culture.

Awareness of Tulsa and curiosity about filming locations have  been growing, Brodie said, with the success of the Harjo’s FX series’, as well as the 2023, largely shot-in-Oklahoma film “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and the set-in-Tulsa “The Outsiders: A New Musical,” a Tony Award-winning Broadway play that started its North America tour this month in Tulsa, a first for Tulsa.

“When we get multiple seasons of this, there’s absolutely going to be plenty of ‘Lowdown’ tourism because we really did shoot 90% of it in Tulsa,” Brodie said.

The meeting’s second strategic discussion featured CMA Strategies founder Pat McFerron, who spoke on State Question 836, which aims to make Oklahoma an open primaries state.

For the State Question 836 issue, McFerron appeared with Margaret Kobos, founder of Oklahoma United.  

SQ 836, which would affect federal, state and county elections, seeks to place all candidates on a single primary ballot, regardless of party affiliation, with the top two vote-getter advancing to the general election.

“Almost all of our elections are decided by just a handful of voters because more than 95 percent of our seats before everybody gets a chance to vote,” McFerron said.

Under Oklahoma’s closed primary system, voters are forced to affiliate with a party just to vote, leading to forced disenfranchisement, he said. The resultant low turnout also typically produces candidates who focus on the extremes and a government that can’t build a consensus to solve problems.

“I worked for years on ‘Right to Work’ because I thought it was wrong to force somebody to join a union just to have a job,” McFerron said. “I think it’s wrong to force someone to join a party just to cast a meaningful vote. That’s our solution. That’s what we’re going for.” 

Following the meeting, the roughly 220 attendees brainstormed on how Tulsa can better itself in the areas of artificial intelligence; regional tourism; economic development; government affairs and community development.