Rian Johnson has become a master of the old-fashioned whodunnit with the Knives Out franchise. But he’s also an avowed fan of other mysteries, namely classic TV series like Columbo and the other series that rotated with it on the NBC Mystery Movie in the 1970s. His new series pairs him up with Natasha Lyonne, who plays a very unlikely detective who doesn’t want to be good at uncovering murders, but she does it anyway.
Opening Shot: A busy-looking carpet in the hallway of a casino hotel.
The Gist: Natalie (Dascha Polanco) is cleaning rooms at the Frost Casino and Hotel, one of those off-the-Strip Vegas hotels that deals with lots of locals. She goes into the presidential suite, currently the room of one of the casino’s “whales”, the highest of high rollers. He’s in the shower, but while she cleans up, she sees something horrifying on his laptop; she takes a picture of it and goes straight to Cliff Legrand (Benjamin Bratt), and they go to Sterling Frost, Jr. (Adrien Brody), whose father recently put him in charge. Frost encourages Natalie to leave early and not clock out, but he dispatches Cliff ahead of her; he kills Natalie’s abusive boyfriend at their home, then kills Natalie, putting the gun in the boyfriend’s hand.
Advertisement
Going back a couple of days, we meet Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), a cocktail waitress at the Frost casino, who’s close friends with Natalie, to the point where she lets Natalie stay at her trailer after she gets hit by her boyfriend again. Frost calls her into his office; she thinks she’s about to get fired, given the deal she had with Frost’s father.
But he knows her story: She won a streak of small-time poker tournaments, and Frost Sr. figured out that the only way she was able to do it was because she has this innate ability to know when people are lying. Frost Sr. gave her a job to basically keep her under his thumb; she’s OK with it, since she’s blackballed from games, anyway, and likes her life as is.
Advertisement
But Frost Jr. doesn’t want to fire her; he wants her help. A particular high roller is playing private games in his suite, and he wants Charlie to help him; through a camera system, she’ll be able so see that the guy is lying during one of his games, and be able to buzz a proxy player whether he’s bluffing or not.
She agrees to it, especially because of the money Frost is offering. But gets highly distracted when she finds about about Natalie. Not quite distracted enough, though, to find a lot of inconsistencies in how the scene of the supposed murder-suicide looked.
Photo: PeacockWhat Shows Will It Remind You Of? It doesn’t take a genius, or reading the extensive number of interviews writer/director Rian Johnson gave in support of Poker Face, to compare this show directly with Columbo or any of the NBC Mystery Movie series from the ’70s. Even the opening credits look similar to the ones used by those shows.
Advertisement
Our Take: One of the big themes of the old NBC Mystery Movie series is “underestimated detectives.” Columbo didn’t carry a gun and drove around in his beat-up car, wearing a wrinkled trenchcoat and smoking a cheap cigar. McCloud was a New Mexican marshal solving crimes in Manhattan. Charlie Cale is in that mold; she’s a cocktail waitress who has this one remarkable, but specific skill. She has no idea how or why she has it, and she mentions to Frost that sometimes it sounds like “birds chirping,” hearing everyone around her lying.
This is the fun of Poker Face. Johnson modernizes the Columbo formula only a little, with some cursing that would never have been uttered on network TV in the ’70s, plus a tiny bit of a continual storyline that provides a thread through how Charlie is able to encounter so many mysteries.
Advertisement
These mysteries aren’t “whodunnits”; we know who did them within the first ten minutes of each episode. Like Columbo, we buckle in and watch the wildly underestimated Charlie use her lie detecting skills, as well as pure logic, to figure out how the perpetrator did it. Seeing her closing in on the murderer, who constantly thinks that he or she has outsmarted everyone, is going to be what keeps people watching, even if the mysteries themselves are closed-ended.
Lyonne, of course, makes Charlie more than just Columbo with a cocktail tray, though. She plays Charlie as a tough, gritty person who has been around and is confident in this special ability, even if she can’t explain it. There are the usual Lyonne flourishes, like a kvetchiness that leans more towards not giving a shit rather than truly complaining about things, that make Charlie a kind of detective that we haven’t seen in the past. She would rather not be involved in these murders, but she also can’t help but be curious, especially when she knows people are lying to her.
It’s going to be a lot of fun to watch Charlie roll into a particular town, and slowly corner the guest-murderer-du-jour through the hour-plus runtime. The mystery of episode 1 was pretty well-constructed despite the fact that Johnson needed time to set up Charlie’s story, so we’re hoping that the mysteries in subsequent episodes will be even more satisfying.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Charlie smashes her cell phone, pours one out of her tallboy Coors Light can to mourn its passing, and hits the road.
Sleeper Star: Benjamin Bratt is too big a star to just play Cliff as a thug who only has a few lines. We’re pretty sure we’ll be seeing him again.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Charlie Cale… I’m here to get fired?” Charlie says to Frost’s assistant.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Fans of mysteries in general and Johnson’s Knives Out franchise will absolutely love Poker Face, as will fans of Lyonne. It’s the right combination of creator, star and format, with plenty of homages to the shows that influenced it to satisfy nostalgia fans.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
