A preliminary review of Poker Face

I really enjoyed the Natasha Lyonne lead series Russian Doll and I like the films of Rian Johnson, so I was very interested when the series Poker Face was announced. Lyonne has often been compared to Peter Falk and as a possible actor for an updated version of his most iconic role: Columbo. The connection led to a visual joke in Russian Doll 2 when Lyonne’s character encounters the statue of Columbo in Budapest.

Poker Face is more of a homage to Columbo and seventies TV in general than a reboot. The primary connection is not Lyonne’s character but the initial use of the same plot devices. Each episode starts with us meeting some new characters, one of whom kills or attempts to kill another person. The (attempted) murder is also one contrived in such a way that the killer has good reason to believe that they will get away it. Sometimes, they contrive the death to look accidental or suicide or committed by somebody else. With Columbo, this setup proved surprisingly fertile for a long-running series of detective dramas. Removing both the whodunnit and howdunnit and even sometimes the whydunnit aspect of detective fiction sounds like there would be nothing left but Falk’s capacity to unravel the deception proved to be TV gold.

Poker Face abandons the police element and adds some extra structural parts to the formula. After the Columbo style opening (person A kills person B and covers up the crime), we rewind a bit to discover more of the backstory and that Lyonne’s character Charlie was to some degree already involved with the set of characters. The events of the (attempted) murder are revisited with more explanation and then the story proceeds into the unravelling of the crime.

Here the show borrows from other classic US TV shows, in particular those shows in which a central character is driven by a broader plot arc to travel the highways and byways of the USA, encountering people. That’s a diverse genre that includes The Fugitive, The Incredible Hulk and Kung-Fu. In the first episode Charlie is embroiled in a death at a casino and, at the end, has to go on the run to avoid the vengeance of some pwerful people. This is the pretext for her being in a different location each episode working for cash in some relatively low-level job.

Where the show touches more on its more genre-adjacent antecedents (eg. the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk) is that Charlie has one special power: she is a human lie detector and can reliably spot when somebody is bullshitting. That strains credulity a little but perhaps less than the trail of dead people that Charlie has encountered. Eight different workplaces so far and we are already more than eight dead people.

OK but is it any good? The nature of the show is that each episode is its own short story about why people try to kill other people (they don’t always succeed). Greed, jealousy, and revenge all play a role. The quality of the episodes depends very much on the individual story and guest stars. The most recent one, Episode 8, which features Nick Nolte as an ageing special effects artist specialising in stop-motion (based in part on Phil “Mad God” Tippet and featuring Tippet’s work) is one I really enjoyed. Others (eg “Rest in Metal” and “Time of the Monkey”) are a lot more mixed.

Lyonne is excellent in all of them but the better episode are often where she is upstaged by the supporting cast and the often absurd plots. It’s not always funny but there’s a campness to the whole show that asks the audience to suspend disbelief and enjoy the absurdity. Rian Johnson’s association with murder mystery is more famously with the two Knives Out films but Poker Face has a very different vibe to it.

There are two more episodes to go and I’ll do a ranking/mini-review of them when the whole series has finished. I’m enjoying the whole thing though.

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