As far back as I can remember, I’ve made my home within mysteries. Not mystery, mind you – any real-life uncertainty is just a tripwire for my anxieties. But maybe that’s why the classic whodunnit has been such a reliable source of solace for me, a problem and its solution conveniently giftwrapped for my entertainment; a ship I can enjoy without wondering how it fit inside its bottle.
Lately, I’ve cozied up in the clockwork castles of Christie’s biggest acolyte, Rian Johnson. If his Knives Out and Glass Onion are a joint thesis statement that the narrative wellsprings of Christie’s style of mysteries are not yet dry, then his new case-of-the-week mystery show, Poker Face, is a fresh tap into the nutrient-rich ground of classic “howcatchems” like Colombo.
Such an obvious echoing of a classic format might easily feel antiquated or overly nostalgic in lesser hands, but Johnson and his many collaborators come out looking like oracles for the way their retro-modern mystery machine takes a rusty old chassis and soups it up with the high-powered character and filmmaking engines of today’s heavily serialized prestige shows. The result is something that doesn’t quite fit in any era, and so could happily cruise through any—without sacrificing an ounce of the humor or vicarious vacationing that makes these mystery shows so cozy in the first place.
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In building us a bookshelf of mostly standalone tales, Poker Face still needs its bookends to hold everything together. Appropriately, the first season opens and closes with a pair of knotted ends whose string threads loosely through the intervening stories. That string’s name is Charlie Cale, and there are two things you need to know about her: she’s played by the inimitable Natasha Lyonne, and she knows when to call “bullshit.”
That first thing is enough to make you believe the second, but Charlie’s knack for whistleblowing is more than a wisened Brooklynite’s BS-detector; in Johnson’s creation, it’s a full superpower. As the show explains it, she can’t explain it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not 100% accurate. Whether someone is intentionally lying or jokingly concealing a mistruth, Charlie registers it instantly with the confidence of a drug dog identifying the scent it was trained to hunt. Why she has this ability to see through the series’ namesake is less important than what it means for the series: despite every episode sticking fairly close to Colombo’s classic “howcatchem” structure, Charlie’s power casually rewrites the rules for the entire subgenre.
Though her travels take her there and back again across a land stained by murder and mishap, there’s a cartographic method to Charlie’s (and Johnson’s) madness. By drawing thumbtacks and string between seemingly disparate episodes, we can trace a route backward to mysteries of old—and forward to the sublime no man’s land Poker Face is staking out for itself.
“The Serialized Capers”
Episode 1: “Dead Man’s Hand”
Episode 10: “The Hook”
When you’re in the business of covering up your recently committed crime from a snooping drifter-turned-detective, lies are the first weapon you draw from your quiver. But since any lie uttered around Charlie is immediately detected, Johnson unlocks a whole new category of clue, subtly shifting the shape of each mystery from a quest to determine lies to an investigation into why people are lying. That usually means Charlie isn’t far beyond the viewer in tracking each case to its inevitable end. Though she doesn’t see it all play out in the opening act like we do, an early lie typically tips her off to the killer’s identity, leaving her to ascertain the implied truth behind their deception.
In the first episode, “Dead Man’s Hand,” those lies are uttered by the first in a long line of impressive guest stars: Adrien Brody and Benjamin Bratt. In this first case, Brody’s rich-kid casino heir and his right-hand man in Bratt are trying/failing to cover up their murder of Charlie’s friend Natalie, a maid at the casino who saw something she shouldn’t have about one of the hotel’s dependable “spenders.” Despite the fact that Charlie is employed by Brody and his off-screen father for the very same power she turns against them, their knowledge of her special skill isn’t enough to stop her from unspooling the yarn we’ve watched them spin.
That might wrap Brody’s story up not-so-nicely by the end of the pilot, but it only sics Bratt on her trail at the behest of Brody’s father, a framing device that rarely pops up over the next eight episodes except to layer in additional narrative rules for Charlie and her detecting to follow.
Beyond her obvious inability to rely on law enforcement to help deliver justice to her perps of the week, Charlie learns to live by a couple of simple-but-vital rules of the road:
- Any locational “ping” she triggers (a credit card purchase, a social media post) will set off a 4-hour countdown to Bratt showing up.
- On the run means out of work, so finding odd jobs for cash is a must to stay further off the grid.
This latter rule is also a convenient plot device that drives Charlie (and us) to a series of distinct, Americana-soaked locations throughout the season. That criss-cross-country roadtrip serves as an instructive metaphor, as while Johnson and co. are busy revitalizing and subverting the form of the weekly mystery, they’re also hard at work mapping it. Beyond giving Charlie a new playground for her hijinks, each location and group of episodes highlights something unique about this classic genre, then dazzles us with the best possible version of that trope.
Besides getting to do our own little mini Days Of Thunder, I love the shifting sympathies in the episode. If it isn’t clear by now, the game we’re trying to play is to surprise you within a consistent structure, and I love when episodic TV does that. pic.twitter.com/NdungnKtPv
— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) February 16, 2023
Of course, what goes up must come down, which is the grounding ethos of Episode 10’s finale, “The Hook.” No matter where Charlie runs to in the pages between the season’s covers — and no matter if we watch those episodes sequentially or shuffled or even in a hypothetical “secret” order a la Cain’s Jawbone—the hook is inevitable, the elasticity of her un/chosen ways of living ever-looming until the moment it snaps her back to earth.
The point of Charlie, though, is that she can’t help but keep pulling against the band. And if you piece together the various lectures from the Johnson-penned finale, you come away with a seemingly contradictory message: we’re helpless to the tractor beam pull of our inner drives, even/especially when they’re ruinous – but! As Charlie’s estranged sister (Clea DuVall) tells her:
“You got a good heart. You choose to spend it on strangers, and then breeze on down the highway, but I don’t know. Maybe that’s right, you know? I mean… I bet you do some good.”
So maybe it’s not a question of whether Charlie’s powers are ruinous, but of where she applies that ruin. Like, for example, directing it at a rogues gallery of criminals, or even a sinister criminal syndicate. She may be too married to vigilantism to join the FBI when Simon Helberg’s special agent offers, but that doesn’t mean she won’t accept conditional help from him and others like him, letting the law play Commissioner Gordon to her Bruce Wayne as she turns her most self-endangering tendencies into someone else’s salvation, over and over again.
Whatever way you drive that winding road between the pilot and the finale’s backstop, we’ve got a lot of road to cover. Lucky, then, that it’s such a scenic route, and that Charlie’s such pleasant company.
The B-Sides
Episode 2: “The Night Shift”
Episode 4: “Rest in Metal”
Episode 7: “The Future of the Sport”
While Johnson’s hand clearly guides the ten-episode season, he only has a writing or directing credit on a handful of entries. Rather than feeling like a concession made to scheduling, this creative delegation has the benefit of filtering Johnson’s well-established mystery cleverness through other voices. These aren’t just ten mini Knives Outs, but unique variations on a delicious theme.
This diversity in approach lets even lesser episodes play more like amusing riffs than total misfires, the interesting experiments on a favorite album that don’t have the replay value of the hits but help shade in the larger colors of the project. Two of my least favorites—Episodes 4 and 7—still contribute to the whole, acting as entertaining palette cleansers between masterpieces and serving us simpler surprises that guide our attention throughout the rest of the season.
The first of these, Episode 4’s toe-dip into the barely existent scene around Chloë Sevigny’s has-been metal singer (“Rest in Metal”), has its own charms to boast, including Sevigny’s worn-in (and worn-out) performance and a cameo from The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle. More than that, the episode nearly makes up for its less-than-compelling mystery with its satisfying ending, a primo example of the kinds of alternative justice Charlie’s own legal issues force her to invent.
Without the ability to simply call the cops on a penned-in criminal, Charlie finds all kinds of unexpected ways to play her trump cards. In Episode 4, that’s by drawing some impossible-to-predict connections between clues disguised as jokes (a Johnson special) and conveniently seeding them to a true crime podcaster, knowing her following will do the rest of the job.
Even without the complexly interwoven plotting of other episodes, this understated callback to seemingly insignificant details (a vintage TV show the victim liked, a podcaster Charlie briefly encountered) coaches us on where to train our eyes. Not every callback has to relate directly to the mystery itself to be satisfying in its reveal, and not every story has to be a mystery to thrill us with its mysteries. In expanding our concept of what a fulfilling case-of-the-week can be, the show flexes its latitude to surprise and deceive us. If we’re paying attention, we’ll start looking for clues beyond simply who killed whom and with what, checking the tape on who’s lying and why and on which background detail will double as a justice’s gavel—just like Charlie does.
Episode 7 (“The Future of the Sport”), another relatively minor entry, hides another major skeleton key to the entire Poker Face gambit. In the middle of the episode, yet another fast friend of Charlie’s comments that “Karma is a kind of consequence,” an obvious observation that Charlie meets with a chuckle. Beneath that half-baked aphorism, though, is a game plan for many of the show’s sly endings; karma is a kind of consequence, but not always the same kind.
Just as a podcast brought down Episode 4’s baddie, Episode 7’s comeuppance comes in the form of a glance down at a quivering hand—not a detective’s denouement but a structural rhyme that lands just as satisfyingly. These subtle, extrajudicial codas would be big nothing’s without the context we’re creatively drip-fed, but the show microdoses us with thematic significance until seemingly innocuous beats land like thunderclaps. Before a more traditional sentence is served in Episode 2’s truck-stop microbiome, we’re hit in the gut by the simple sight of a smaller character taking out their hearing aids, the final cage dropping in a game of emotional Mousetrap. Any story can be a mystery.
“Against Types”
Episode 5: “Time of the Monkey”
Episode 9: “Escape from Shit Mountain”
And any actor can be a criminal. One of the greatest pleasures of Colombo and the many case-of-the-week shows that followed is the low commitment/high reward opportunity for its guest stars to pop in, leave it all on the field as a memorable murderer or victim, and pop out (often in a blaze of glory). Likewise, no one but Charlie and Benjamin Bratt’s serialized villain appears in more than one episode of Poker Face, so we’re dealt a new hand of face cards each week, and a new chance for actors old and new to drop in for a dedicated hour of medium-speed batting practice.
The heightened laws of nature governing a show where a murder must happen every week also means the typical limitations on what a one-episode guest star can reasonably do hold little gravity. That frees us up for some exquisite against-typecasting, starting with Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson’s duet as nursing home murderers in Episode 5, “Time of the Monkey.”
Two Law & Order veterans playing the unlikely septuagenarian killers is juicy enough to start, but it’s the length of runway they’re given to subvert their usual steely charm with anarchic irreverence (the senior living version of the college revolutionaries they once were) that really lets the performances take flight. Seeing these women so far out of their normal zones is jarring enough from the jump that by the time we get to their WWE-level brawl with Charlie by episode’s end, we hardly bat an eye.
Every episode of Poker Face starts with a blank canvas. Johnson and company then unload their endless closet of art supplies, creating one-off artworks that can range in tone and style from restrained minimalism to Pollockian bloodbath.
Episode 9, “Escape from Shit Mountain,” is closer to the former. In another casual masterstroke of casting, Johnson returns to direct his take on The Hateful Eight (strangers in a snowy cabin with frosty iceberg tips hinting at bloody secrets beneath the surface) and reunite with his longtime collaborator, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Beyond the simple pleasure of watching Johnson’s old muse face off against his new one in Lyonne, it’s fun to watch JL go against type as a bad boy, weaponizing the winsome, slacker charisma of his 2010s characters and putting it through a 2020s filter to find a more cynical (but not unlikely) endpoint for his usual upward-failing charmers.
That’s not Episode 9’s only bit of meta-casting, as JGL is mirrored by less-famous David Castañeda, playing the more blue-collar version of where JGL’s Trey would’ve ended up had he faced the consequences of his actions. Seeing a successful, somewhat reclusive star absolutely spitting arrogance at a talented up-and-comer helps sell Trey’s assumed self-importance, and our growing sympathy for Castañeda’s Jimmy makes it easier to turn on an actor we’re so used to rooting for. Throw in Stephanie Hsu as a hilarious funhouse mirror version of Charlie, and you’ve got a bisected foursome made up of two bisected odd-couple pairings. There’s a version of Poker Face where an influential creator leverages his clout to get flashy guest stars to mail in performances; then there’s this version, where even the biggest stars sublimate themselves into the bigger vision, splashing their roles across the canvas and creating another singular art piece to hang in the show’s growing gallery.
“Masterpieces in Miniature”
Episode 3: “The Stall”
Episode 6: “Exit Stage Death”
Episode 8: “The Orpheus Syndrome”
Of course, a gallery can’t subsist wholly on style exercises, and Poker Face has no shortage of outright masterpieces, the first of which comes in the form of Episode 3, “The Stall.”
Set in a wood-smoked, back-roads barbecue pit outside Houston, Texas, we follow Lil Rel Howery’s Taffy Boyle (against type!) and Larry Brown’s George Boyle as BBQ-owning brothers. As you could deduce from the names, George is the skilled pitmaster behind the money-making meat, and Taffy is the motormouthed salesman bringing those meats to the money-paying masses via advertising efforts including a local radio show lauding barbecue’s sauce-stained history. When George has a hilarious awakening that recasts his life’s work as the cruel slaughter of innocents, business-minded Taffy and George’s wife, Mandy (The Tourist’s Danielle Macdonald), act fast to hard-stop his intentions of shuttering their operations. Unfortunately for them, Charlie recently joined on as George’s apprentice, and hell if she can’t smell their deceit.
That may sound like the ingredients for a deep-fried “Colombo goes south” diversion, but Poker Face is defter with the knife than that, carving a whole world out of this cross-section of America. The third episode’s idiosyncrasies (cinnamon-flavored floss, musical treatises on the flavor effects of various smoking woods, a racist dog) act as seasonings for its own little universe, making an intricately plotted mystery feel less like a constructed puzzle-box and more like a vibrant terrarium where puzzles happen to be playing out.
In order to fit such a lushly expansive world in a sub-60-minute container, the show has to take a hint from George and resourcefully use every part of the cow. Johnson and his writers dutifully lean on every ounce of potential fat in their scripts, asking even the smallest details to pull double duty as both world-enriching color and functional clues. It would be fine if George’s symposium on the nuanced effect of wood variety on barbecue flavor were just a charming characterization of a man who approaches his food prep like a conductor approaches their orchestra, but it’s infinitely richer for doubling as a clue for Charlie to find incriminating evidence. Likewise, it’s darkly amusing that a young Black man in the episode plays to his audience by cosplaying as a white racist for a far-right radio show; it’s clever that his talent for voice work later helps Charlie catch the killers.
If Episode 3 epitomizes Poker Face’s economical approach to building its constellation of episodes, Episode 8 (“The Orpheus Syndrome”) shows us how intricate each of those component stars truly is. Set in upstate New York, this case has Charlie gradually enmeshing herself in the affairs of a cinematic triumvirate: the great Cherry Jones’ Laura, the great Nick Nolte’s Arthur, and the great Tim Russ’ Max. The three were co-founders of Lights and Motion, a thinly-veiled stand-in for George Lucas’ Industrial Lights and Magic visual effects company. After an accidental-ish murder early in LAM’s run, Arthur’s Phil Tippett-esque stop-motion artist left the company and Max suspiciously died by suicide – right in front of his wife, Laura.
That set-up is fairly typical of Poker Face (and just as well-performed), but the show’s continued devotion to detail helps what could feel like reading a two-sheet micro-mystery feel like flipping through a dusty, life-filled tome. That richness begins with Arthur and his Tippettian workshop, bursting at the seams with richly imagined stop-motion figures worthy of the Mad God auteur.
A lesser show wouldn’t have the passion or the budget to populate a fictional artist’s workshop with anything near this level of craft and magic—much less to “yes-and” the formulaic creatives-at-odds mystery set-up until they landed on such a singular version of the story. On the contrary, most shows of this ilk would specifically avoid writing a stop-motion master character into their scripts precisely to avoid having to bring one to life; the fact that Johnson and his crack team purposefully wrote one—and obviously relished every second of doing so—tells you everything you need to know about Poker Face’s secret sauce.
They only have us for an hour each week, so they spend it giving us a roller-coaster tour of the miraculous snow globes they’ve built, showing us so much (and hinting at more) that it’s hard to imagine ever reaching a border of these worlds, even if we rode around in them forever.
As far as pocket-size universes with infinite horizons go, there’s no better place to end than with Episode 6, “Exit Stage Death,” a virtuosic exercise in doing the most. Where “The Orpheus Syndrome” put unnecessary-but-appreciated effort into animating its stop-motion world, “Exit Stage Death” takes the highest-brow approach possible into fleshing out the concept of dinner theater.
Within the confines of this consistently great show, an episode with Tim Meadows and Ellen Barkin playing sparring former TV co-stars reuniting for a one-night-only performance at a dinner theater needn’t be much more than that elevator pitch to be a great hang. How much more delightful, then, that the setup is taken to its logical extreme, complete with a fully-realized fictional three-hander (The Ghosts of Pensacola) worthy of whatever the opposite of a Pulitzer is.
The knowingly horrid play, Meadows’ and Barkin’s pitch-perfect (and dual-geared) performances, and Charlie’s allergy to this low-rent playhouse all combine for arguably the season’s funniest episode. But even in a case tuned more toward comedy, the humor doesn’t undercut the moments of (ironically) true acting and emoting that shines through the story’s goofier beats. Like the recent film Everything Everywhere All at Once, Poker Face uses its humor as sleight of hand, lowering your defenses before sucker-punching you with heart. Its sort of the inverse of that aphorism about jokes being funnier when death is in the room – sometimes having your lungs warmed up with laughter preps them to harbor sobs, too, should they come.
That’s never really the vibe of Poker Face, but that doesn’t mean its fleet of talented guest stars don’t find their moments of pathos. Outright baddies like Meadows and Barkin might not win our sympathies, but they’re given enough space between their on-stage scenery-chewing and their backstage unmaskings to draw complex portraits of actors confronting the limits of their success.
Then there’s Chris McKinney’s Phil, the dinner theater’s stage manager and one of many charity cases of Charlie’s. Nearly once an episode, she’ll forge a kinship with either the direct victim or someone indirectly endangered by the central crime, her altruism pushing her to drill down past the surface lies to find some semblance of justice. Its these characters (and Charlie’s affection for them) that form the show’s moral and empathetic center, a warm wrinkle on the usual detective’s motive in shows like this (they’re paid and/or bored).
It helps that even the “smallest” roles are propped up by actors swinging for the Guest Actor Emmy fences; it often feels like Poker Face took the background characters from similar shows and sent them to Juilliard for an intensive 3-week workshop. The effect is simply one of a million that the show wears like a luxury (leather, dusty) jacket, looking like quality even when its hijinks are… highest.
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The juxtaposition between Charlie’s antics as a weird little guy (an identity that couldn’t be truer to her detective lineage of Colombos and Monks and Shawn Spencers) and the dramatic heights the show can attain is solved as easily as one of Charlie’s cases: Poker Face simply has as much heft as it wants to have. And besides, the comedy never feels divorced from the serious, mysterious web-spinning, but part of the same unique cocktail; callbacks are just as useful in mysteries as in jokes.
After all, every time Charlie “just one more thing”s her way into an impossibly clever solution, it’s so brilliant I laugh. That’s a kind of comedy, too – one that’s usually underscored by the return of Nathan Johnson’s plucky banjo theme, a musical cue for a punchline that paints a smile on my face for the next hour. And for all the heavy dramas and prestige comedies we have to enjoy (and occasionally toil over) these days, a banjo, a laugh, and a smile ain’t a bad way to spend every Thursday for a couple of months.
