Rian Johnson specializes in satisfaction. The filmmaker behind Knives Out, Glass Onion, and the time-travel thriller Looper loves to construct narrative puzzle boxes where perfect solutions emerge in cathartic “aha!” moments.
It’s no surprise, then, that Poker Face, the Peacock original series that marks Johnson’s foray into television, is also precisely structured. Built around Natasha Lyonne’s electric presence — and stretched out over a 10-episode season rather than limited to a two-hour movie — the show is more than just a series of nested story containers with stellar production values. It’s an extremely satisfying exercise in rhythmic perfection. (The final episode was released on March 9; a second season has already been greenlit.)
First, there’s the episodic format, a classic “howcatchem” or inverted detective story: unlike a whodunit, the audience watches the crime happen and then roots for the protagonists as they piece it together. Each episode begins in some distinct corner of the U.S. as tensions unfold. After 20-ish minutes, a murder occurs. Then the clock rewinds, and Charlie Cale (Lyonne) rolls into town, getting a paid-in-cash gig and befriending the cast of characters involved in the crime. As a modern-day Columbo with an uncanny (and unexplained) gift for discerning when people are lying, Cale slowly realizes that all is not as it seems while the accident/suicide/missing body dominates local news. In the final third of each episode, she puts the clues together and cracks the case, orchestrating either practical or divine justice for the baddie before getting back in her baby-blue Plymouth Barracuda and moving on to the next town.
In the further spirit of a throwback detective show, Johnson also fashions a tidy season-long arc that explains how Charlie’s accidental crime-solving wanderings were set in motion. The series begins in Nevada, where Charlie runs afoul of retired casino owner Sterling Frost Sr. (a perfectly gravelly Ron Perlman) after his maladroit son (Adrian Brody) recruits Charlie for a lie-detection scheme — and simultaneously has his hitman Cliff LeGrand (Benjamin Bratt) kill Charlie’s best friend. A faceless call from a livid Frost Sr. establishes the show’s stakes: “There’s not a corner of this country small enough for you to hide in,” he tells Charlie. And we’re off.
The finale clicks into jigsaw-like place with the opening, as Frost Senior’s side of that call kicks off the episode. In the series’ first episode, Junior tells Charlie two of three rules his father imparted to him about running the casino, but said that the third “doesn’t matter”; in the finale, Senior reveals the third, which proves instrumental for the episode’s twist-heavy plot.
Throughout, the show upholds its own principles while throwing in a few well-calibrated subversions that play with viewer expectations just as the formula begins to verge on rote. Bratt’s cool-guy hitman character also pops up every now and then to reestablish the stakes of Charlie’s wanderings whenever they start seeming functionally purposeless.
The show’s greatest trick is Charlie herself: Lyonne is an actress of steady rhythms. The liltingly gruff voice, the swaggering walk, the steady rise-and-fall syntax of her phrasing — her screen persona is consistent, which is not at all to say it’s boring. Armed with yellow-tinted aviators, a red lip, and Lyonne’s signature spiky orange curls, Charlie Cale sets every frame of Poker Face on fire as her deep empathy, curiosity, and charm overflow from one sticky situation to another. The guest stars populating each new case are all clearly having the time of their lives playing off Lyonne and inhabiting their episode’s world.
The show occasionally sacrifices believable complexity for the sake of hanging together seamlessly. It verges on magical realism to accept that in today’s hyper-surveilled world, Charlie would be able to stay off the grid for more than a year just by smashing her cell phone and using cash. This suspension of disbelief is offhandedly addressed in the finale, where Atlantic City casino maven and new antagonist Beatrix Hasp (voiced by Rhea Perlman) tells Charlie in a parallel faceless phone call that she’s now up against a “fully modernized crime syndicate.” Whether this tech savvy will pose any real problem for Charlie next season remains to be seen.
And in this age of the television antihero, the moral compass of Poker Face can be startlingly simple. The good guys are good, the baddies bad. This is most frustrating in the episodes that take pains to shade in the arguably noble motivations — political protest, challenging a local economic elite — of the eventual killers, only to afford those motives zero credence and ultimately render the characters purely evil. There’s also Simon Helberg’s young gun FBI character, Luca, who owes his rising status at the bureau to Charlie’s BS meter. The anti-establishment Charlie, of course, declines a job offer from the feds — but it’s a little itchy that they’re in cahoots at all.
In the bingeing era, most successful weekly TV appointments have relied on the effectiveness of their serialized storytelling: if the show is addictive enough, people will tune in. The closest analogue to Poker Face, then, might not be HBO’s Sunday lineup but Abbott Elementary, the delightful smash-hit mockumentary sitcom airing weekly on ABC. Both shows adopt classic formats to bank on the audience wanting to spend time with a character (or characters) each week. Viewers return not for the big reveal but for the pleasure of the show’s company. And whether the world of Poker Face is wholly believable or not, it’s still a perfectly structured pleasure.
