Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne’s Barnstorming Crime Series Poker Face Is a Win for Peacock
Photo Courtesy of Peacock
Were we complaining about new shows being helmed by flashy big names for the first couple episodes, only to then slip into using other writers and directors to mimic the showrunner’s style? Couldn’t have been us! Especially not with the winning combination of creator and star we get in Poker Face. In this Peacock series, Rian Johnson leads a barnstormer of a murder mystery show, kicking us off with an exquisite pilot before we head out on backroads and highways through America’s undergrowth, solving a different crime every week. It’s a show that loves three things equally: Natasha Lyonne, Columbo, and getting us hooked on stories.
Johnson has been enjoying his fair share of praise and dissent for his knowingly goofy humour and tricksy narratives, but even his most diehard fans will have missed the darker, noir-stamped feeling of his earlier work. Brick and Looper aren’t devoid of humour, but they feel more muted and restrained when compared to the visually arresting but showy pep of the Knives Out films. It’s amazing, then, that in Poker Face’s pilot (the only episode screened for critics that’s both written and directed by Johnson) we don’t just return to the dark and twisted—it ranks among his best work.
At a ratty casino hotel that nevertheless holds huge sway over a backwater town, a murderous cover-up pricks the ears of the shaggy-haired Charlie (Natasha Lyonne), who until this point has coasted on odd jobs and occasionally cheating at card games. This is because she has one uncannily perceptive advantage: she can always tell when someone is lying. The rules of this gift are laid out pretty succinctly (she can’t predict the future, can’t read minds, doesn’t immediately know why someone’s lying), so we can quickly get to its real benefits: solving crimes.
Johnson has said before Columbo ranks among his all-time favourite series, and his and Lyonne’s love for the scrappy, unassuming Lieutenant is not just visible in Charlie’s characterisation, but baked into the show’s structure. Poker Face is case-of-the-week, yes, but it’s not a conventional “whodunnit;” rather it’s an inverted detective story—commonly referred to as a “howcatchem.” In this model, the crime unfolds at the top of each episode, introducing us to new characters, scenarios, and vendettas before our detective is introduced. The drama is not who committed this crime, but will the criminal get away with it? Can Charlie parse through circumstance and plausible alibis to find the presence of a cold-blooded murder hiding in plain sight, and even then, will they be able to find enough hard evidence to get justice to occur?