As some of you probably know, Poker Face is a recent murder mystery series created by Rian Johnson, who’s also behind the Knives Out murder mystery films (Knives Out, Glass Onion, and Wake Up Dead Man is due in December).
Poker Face is a beautiful redeployment of the Columbo formula - we the audience know who did it, and why, and how, from the beginning, and so the fun is watching the murderer try and stave off the inevitable revelation by the detective for as long as possible. And our detective isn’t an affably goofy LAPD detective, but one Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), a Vegas waitress who happens to be an infallible lie detector. So the fun (sometimes) is seeing how quickly the murderer cottons on to this and does whatever they can to misdirect and avoid Charlie without actually lying to her face. It’s a lot of fun.
Also built into the first one and a half seasons is a season arc of Charlie being on the run from a mob boss who’s very upset with her because (spoilers) and so travelling through the US in a new town or state every week and running into a guest star murderer every time.
The second season just ended and honestly I’m not sure Johnson stuck the landing - I think there could have been a little more foreshadowing - but it was excellent. I really liked how the writers realised that as fun as murder/town/state of the week was, it was getting repetitive, and so change it up halfway through season 2. My favourite so far is episode 1 of season 2; the guest star is Cynthia Erivo (from Wicked) who gets to enjoy herself playing quadruplets (or is it quintuplets?). Episodes 4 and 7 of season 1 are also very strong.
In any case, I really recommend it if you like murder mysteries, it’s one of the sharpest and best series around right now. If you’ve seen it, what do you think?
Poker Face is a beautiful redeployment of the Columbo formula - we the audience know who did it, and why, and how, from the beginning, and so the fun is watching the murderer try and stave off the inevitable revelation by the detective for as long as possible. And our detective isn’t an affably goofy LAPD detective, but one Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), a Vegas waitress who happens to be an infallible lie detector. So the fun (sometimes) is seeing how quickly the murderer cottons on to this and does whatever they can to misdirect and avoid Charlie without actually lying to her face. It’s a lot of fun.
Also built into the first one and a half seasons is a season arc of Charlie being on the run from a mob boss who’s very upset with her because (spoilers) and so travelling through the US in a new town or state every week and running into a guest star murderer every time.
The second season just ended and honestly I’m not sure Johnson stuck the landing - I think there could have been a little more foreshadowing - but it was excellent. I really liked how the writers realised that as fun as murder/town/state of the week was, it was getting repetitive, and so change it up halfway through season 2. My favourite so far is episode 1 of season 2; the guest star is Cynthia Erivo (from Wicked) who gets to enjoy herself playing quadruplets (or is it quintuplets?). Episodes 4 and 7 of season 1 are also very strong.
In any case, I really recommend it if you like murder mysteries, it’s one of the sharpest and best series around right now. If you’ve seen it, what do you think?
