Though the new Peacock mystery series Poker Face takes place in the present day, the opening credits appear in a mustard-yellow all-caps typeface that pastiches the beginning of a ’70s network TV show, going so far as to include the title of each episode in quotes and the year of release in Roman numerals. Showrunner Rian Johnson has said that the show’s “howcatchem” structure, in which the killer’s identity is known from the start and the intrigue comes from seeing how our gumshoe cracks the case, is indebted to the crime procedurals he grew up watching, murder-of-the-week stories like Columbo. Given that influence, casting Natasha Lyonne as the series’ crimesolving heroine was a natural. Lyonne’s raspy voice and shambolic energy have often been compared to the demeanor of the Peter Falk’s trenchcoat-clad detective, and the actress herself has cited Falk as a personal acting hero. Like Falk, Lyonne has a knack for seeming at once spacily distracted and acutely observant. And like him, she is now the charismatic anchor of a quick-witted murder-of-the-week show that’s as irresistibly poppable as a bag of malted milk balls.
In the first season of Russian Doll, the two-season series Lyonne co-created and starred in for Netflix, the mystery her character set out to solve was metaphysical and autobiographical in nature: What could she learn from her own past that might help her escape the time loop that was compelling her to relive the same fatal birthday over and over? In the show’s second season, that dilemma having been sorted, Lyonne’s Nadia found herself revisiting parts of her mentally ill mother’s life to understand the events surrounding her own birth. By contrast, Charlie Cale, the preternaturally gifted vagrant who is the heroine of Poker Face, sets out each week to puzzle through a different enigma that has nothing whatsoever to do with her own psychological backstory. In fact, six episodes in (the full season is 10 episodes, but only the first six were shared with critics), the viewer still knows zilch about where Charlie comes from or how she came to possess the singular talent that makes her such a skilled amateur detective: the ability to sense when anyone is telling a lie, not via psychic powers but simply by what seems to be an inborn gift for reading people’s faces and voices for a giveaway “tell.” It’s a testament to the new series’ confidence in its own farfetched premise that, by the end of the pilot, this semi-magical trait seems as natural and immutable a part of Charlie’s character as her black pointy boots, her sky-blue 1969 Plymouth Barracuda, and her Pomeranian mop of dirty-blond curls.
In the first episode, written and directed by Johnson, Charlie is working as a cocktail waitress in a Las Vegas casino when her fellow employee and close friend (Orange Is the New Black’s Dascha Polanco) is killed in what appears to be a domestic violence case. But Charlie, noticing that the newly installed casino boss (Adrien Brody) and his henchman (Benjamin Bratt) are lying about some details connected to the incident, sets out to investigate for herself. As it turns out, the casino’s management is aware of Charlie’s past as a poker hustler (when you’re playing a game that involves bluffing, having a built-in polygraph machine is an invaluable tool). Unaware that they are on her radar as possible killers, they blackmail her into helping them capture a casino high-roller involved in dirty doings.
After Charlie, fearing for her own safety, skips town at the end of the first episode, Bratt’s grim-faced casino enforcer takes off in hot pursuit—and then mostly disappears from sight, replaced by a rotating cast of refreshingly not grim-faced guest stars. In a formula that used to rule primetime TV but now reads as retro, a host of recognizable faces—Chloë Sevigny, Lil Rel Howery, Nick Nolte, Ellen Barkin, Tim Meadows, Joseph Gordon-Levitt—cycle through the show from week to week as Charlie, working odd jobs and living out of her car, moves from one town to the next. (The show also features some less recognizable faces that may nonetheless delight keen-eyed fans, such as longtime Rian Johnson collaborator Noah Segan, who has appeared in each of Johnson’s films, and the novelist and Mountain Goats singer-songwriter John Darnielle, finally living out his lifelong dream of being metal royalty.) In an element that sets Poker Face apart from most crime-solving shows, our heroine never arrives on the scene after the act is committed. Rather, she is already acquainted with all the key players through whatever menial job she has taken in her new place of residence. Sometimes, as in the episode that costars Sevigny as a washed-up rock singer, Charlie befriends the future crime victim. In other cases, as in an especially clever installment featuring Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson as onetime leftist radicals now living in a senior care home, she befriends the killers. And every case so far has shared a temporal twist with Johnson’s two whodunit movies, Knives Out and Glass Onion, in which repeated flashbacks provide a fresh perspective on the incident under investigation.
The preposterousness of the conceit that there would just happen to be a violent killing in every town Charlie visits is a part of the audience’s initial buy-in, just as viewers of Murder, She Wrote—another show Johnson has claimed as an influence—had to accept the notion that the mystery-writing heroine’s small town in Maine was one of the murder capitals of the world. In a couple of episodes, the trail of clues Charlie follows to solve the case is too clearly marked, so that the audience gets there before she does.
But at its heart Poker Face is not a brain-teasing series about a super-sleuth. It’s a hangout show that relies on the pleasure of Natasha Lyonne’s company, which even in the weaker installments is considerable. Not unlike Daniel Craig’s courtly Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out series, Charlie Cale is an appealing departure from the glum antihero that has become standard in TV crime shows over the past few decades. Aside from adding to the fun of the show, this bit of characterization also has a political dimension. At a time when we’ve become increasingly skeptical of pop-culture depictions of the police, Charlie is an investigator we can root for without worrying that we’re indulging in “copaganda.” (In an early episode, she initially plans to email a piece of smoking-gun evidence to the local police, before she thinks better and adds another series of recipients that’s too good to spoil.) But the fact that she’s such an amiable amateur—a curious person who simply gets drawn into the social dynamics of each new town she visits—also benefits Charlie: The future culprits have a tendency to open up to her, often revealing more about themselves than they should, simply because they enjoy being around her. If you miss the kind of episodic storytelling that cares more about delivering a one-hour-long bundle of amusement than about keeping the viewer in suspense until the next installment, you’re likely to enjoy being around her, too.
Correction, Jan. 27: This article originally misidentified Columbo as a private eye.
