Poker Face‘s Fine Second Season Doesn’t Quite Live Up to Its First
Photo by Ralph Bavaro, courtesy of Peacock
Streaming: where it can take almost two and a half years since its premiere for a hit show’s second season to start. Poker Face arrived in early 2023 as a smart, modern riff on Columbo starring Natasha Lyonne as an effortlessly cool, almost-psychic, entirely unintentional detective, with a stage-setting pilot written and directed by Knives Out creator Rian Johnson. With its twisty mysteries, world-class roster of guest stars, and compelling season-long arc about Lyonne’s character Charlie Cale hiding out from Ron Perlman’s vengeance-seeking casino owner, Poker Face was a buzzy favorite back in ‘23, with an Emmy nomination for Lyonne and a win for guest star Judith Light.
Two years is a lot of time, though. Since Poker Face’s first season the broadcast networks have hopped back on the Columbo train, with CBS’s Elsbeth fully embracing the same guest star-heavy “howcatchem” format Poker Face is known for (where viewers see who committed the crime in the opening act). Elsbeth and ABC’s High Potential also both have a similar comedic tone and both star idiosyncratic, unlikely crime-solvers in a vein similar to Charlie Cale. Between the long break and the busier airwaves, it’s fair to wonder if Poker Face’s second season can measure up to the first, or if it will struggle to recapture what made it fresh and exciting to begin with.
Based on the first 10 of this season’s 12 episodes, Poker Face’s second season retains enough of what made the first work to entertain the show’s fans. It’s not as smooth or satisfying as that first batch of episodes, though, leaning too hard into the humor throughout, and too often with a self-satisfied quirkiness that the first season only occasionally flashed. At its best Poker Face Season 2 rivals the best of Season 1; at its worst, it just tries a little too hard. And part of the problem lies with the show’s central conceit: that Cale has the preternatural ability to tell when somebody’s lying.
Lyonne matter-of-factly muttering “bullshit” after a character tells a whopper doesn’t ever get old, but the idea that she’s a walking lie detector has never fully felt right. It builds the whole show on a foundation that’s just a little too inherently silly, and becomes an easy shortcut that writers take instead of fleshing out their mysteries. Certain episodes in Season 2 do smartly account for this narrative gimmick, with characters eliding facts without actually lying, or phrasing things in such a way that they’re not technically untrue despite being lies; they’re clever bits of writing, but it’s so obvious a technique that it only underscores how Cale’s superhuman skill has become a crutch.
Season 2 is also hurt by how it handles what appears to be its season-long mystery. It wraps up surprisingly early, with most of the season’s episodes serving as one-offs. It’s possible the last two episodes, which weren’t provided to critics, might pull on threads introduced earlier in the season, but even then it wouldn’t have the impact of Benjamin Bratt’s recurring hitman from the first season. There’s really no hint of a larger direction during the season’s second half, and although that’s in no way a deal-breaker as long as individual episodes are still strong, it does make Season 2 feel a little less planned out and more like a typical network detective show.