The vintage Plymouth Barracuda rolls on. Fittingly, it’s slightly tatty but it has a vibe all of its own. As we rejoin Natasha Lyonne’s hyper-charismatic human lie detector Charlie Cale, for a second season of what a narrative theorist would call inverted detective stories and we might think of as “howcatchems”, she’s still racing across America. She has a casino owner and an organised crime gang on her tail (initially, at least, they seem both spectacularly dimwitted and are terribly poor shots), but as if that wasn’t enough to cope with, she still can’t stop running into murder mysteries and she still can’t help solving them. Somehow though, she still seems to be having fun. And therefore, so are we.
Poker Face (Sky Max) is, in current TV terms, something of an anomaly. Created by Knives Out director Rian Johnson, it proudly sets its stall out to entertain – which often doesn’t feel like a given in the context of the labyrinthine longueurs of much streaming-era television. On the face of it, it’s a simple show; a “case of the week” throwback. While certain dramas wear narrative complexity like a badge of honour, Poker Face is as brisk, no-nonsense and free of airs and graces as the lead character herself.
Like the shows it most obviously recalls (it’s impossible not to mention Columbo at this point), it’s deeply contrived. But the contrivances are a big part of the fun – sometimes they subvert conventions, sometimes they wink gleefully at them. Clues fall conveniently into Charlie’s lap and, for some reason, it works. Often, during her reveals, she’ll pace the room; a woman performing Peter Falk karaoke and inviting viewers to laugh fondly along with her. And yet Poker Face never tips over into self-indulgence – alongside its style and wit, it carries real emotional weight too.
This is almost entirely down to Lyonne, whose wry, weary resilience sustains the show. “Introspection makes me queasy,” says Charlie. And it’s easy to imagine why – Charlie doesn’t understand her own gift for sniffing out bull**** and nor does she particularly welcome it. Instead, these situations find her as she ricochets from town to town and job to job; taking on temporary work that ranges from fruit picking to Halloween zombie enactment. With kind eyes and a voice like sandpaper, she elicits confidences from almost everyone she meets. And that’s really her problem: she’s incapable of ignoring people and even less able to avoid empathising. Across this second series, her inner life and backstory start to manifest themselves, even if she’d rather they didn’t.
In the meantime, she revels in what she describes, somewhat self-mockingly, as “the unobserved pageant of the ordinary”. The individual cases themselves are beautifully realised and this is key to the show’s consistency. At their best, and like the finest literary short stories, they offer brief but total immersion in a fully imagined world. Take the series opener, featuring a bravura performance from Cynthia Erivo who plays five parts, often simultaneously. Amber (Erivo) and her quadruplet sisters (Erivo) were child actors – the rotating stars of cheesy but beloved TV show Kid Cop. They were cheated of their rightful fortunes by their scheming mother who is about to die. Amber, who has devoted her life to caring for this cruel, selfish woman, decides she deserves the bulk of the inheritance. But how far might she be prepared to go to get it? With the episode’s head-spinning identity swaps and layers of multiplying subterfuge, it is, in what feels like a deliberate nod to Lyonne’s breakthrough lead show, a true Russian Doll of a storyline.
And so it goes on. Charlie quits town again, heading to a funeral home, then a grade school talent show, then an alligator farm. And what initially feels like repetition soon begins to feel like a deepening of intention. It’s lightly carried and never clumsily forced but even so, there’s a fairly serious examination of the concept of truth going on here. Most of the people Charlie meets have created different personas to help them deal with themselves. “You call it a lie, I call it my truth,” as Amber says. But is Charlie really any different? Opposing versions of truth unfold wherever she goes, and she detects them unfailingly, but Charlie is on the run from reality too.
While Poker Face is awash with memorable cameos – this time, expect Awkwafina, Method Man, Giancarlo Esposito and many more – the most telling is Rhea Perlman’s casino owner Beatrix Hasp. Beatrix represents grim destiny, the end of the road for Charlie. Poker Face never dodges reality (and how could it, given its premise?), but it never stumbles under its own weight either. This show is irreverent fun with a big moral heart and a very human sense of chaos and jeopardy, and it never forgets to give us what we need. How much longer can the Barracuda keep rolling? With Charlie at the wheel, I hope we have a long road trip ahead of us.
