When Peacock‘s Poker Face premiered back in 2023, my biggest complaint came from a place of privilege: There was so much to enjoy about creator Rian Johnson and producer-star Natasha Lyonne’s loving tribute to the NBC Mystery Movie wheel programming of the ’70s that when the series settled for being “very good” instead of “great,” that felt regrettable.
For two subsequent years, nearly every time I watched a show boasting The World’s Greatest Detective or a Human Lie Detector — TV writers love a Human Lie Detector like a Hot Zone virologist loves a HAZMAT suit — my takeaway was something akin to, “No, Elsbeth isn’t bad, but Poker Face showed how you could make basically the exact same show, only with a little bit more ambition and artistry.”
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Poker Face
Arriving more than two years later — look, CGI dragons take time to produce — the second season of Poker Face has bridged that qualitative gap in slightly disappointing fashion. Elsbeth is a fine show, with occasionally twisty episodic plots and frequently inspired guest stars, so saying that season two of Poker Face isn’t better or worse than Elsbeth needn’t be considered a harsh criticism, but based on pedigree, it feels that way.
The new season of Poker Face is fine, but a show that started off proving how a hybrid of broadcast and prestige television might look — see also, more recently, The Pitt — has now become closer to simply a decent broadcast show on a streaming platform. Through the 10 episodes I’ve seen out of the season’s 12, none of the Poker Face weekly adventures is a total dud, but nothing matches the stylistic flair of “Dead Man’s Hand,” the conceptual adventurousness of “The Orpheus Syndrome” or the elevated stakes of “Escape from Shit Mountain.”
The problem, then, becomes less a matter of underachieving and more a limitation of aspiration.
The season kicks off with what is, if nothing else, a guest star highlight. Directed by Johnson and written by Laura Deeley, “The Game Is a Foot” features Cynthia Erivo as five sisters, one of whom killed the mother (Jasmine Guy), who stole their apparently hefty residuals from the rather silly cop show that they once collectively starred in. The episode is too brief for Erivo to really dig deeply into any of the characters, much less all five, but with an assortment of different hairstyles and accents, there’s no doubt that she’s having a lot of fun.
The mechanics of the mystery are pretty flimsy, but with its Columbo-y “howcatchem” (instead, once again, of “whodunit”) format, that hardly matters. All you need to know or remember from the first season is that Lyonne’s Charlie Cale is a Human Lie Detector and that’s where her investigative skills begin and end — and that’s where the series’ mystery plotting begins and ends.
The structure of Poker Face, which felt impressively elastic in the first season, has calcified as probably the least adventurous version of itself and definitely the most repetitive. Each episode gives us a 13-to-17-minute prologue, introducing the guest stars and the murder. Then Charlie shows up, immediately calls “bullshit” on the killer, explains her secret power to either the killer or a handy ally — the first season stopped needing to explain the premise after a while, but the second season returns that exposition to a weekly occurrence — and we wait patiently for the killer to basically talk themselves into apprehension. Even if Charlie is seen reading Borges and making references to esoteric Dennis Hopper movies, much of her cleverness is gone and, with it, almost all of the show’s stakes.
The first season began with Charlie going on the run in her distinctive powder-blue Plymouth Barracuda, with Benjamin Bratt on her tail as head of security at the Vegas casino she was fleeing. The finale featured the introduction of Rhea Perlman as Beatrix Hasp, the mobbed-up owner of a rival casino, presented as a potential Big Bad. But after an initial joke about how Charlie has been living in constant danger presented by anonymous inept assassins, the story shifts in a way that causes Poker Face to lose its connective tissue and much of its justification for Charlie Cale to be crisscrossing the United States at all. At some point, she even settles down and spends consecutive episodes in the same place and, at that stage, all differentiation between Poker Face and Elsbeth is gone.
I completely agree that the serialized backdrop for Poker Face was unsustainable. You couldn’t just have Benjamin Bratt showing up at the end of every episode, Charlie evading him in her Barracuda and then going exactly far enough away in the same distinctive car for him to find her the next week.
But this isn’t a Jessica Fletcher situation, in which one town coincidentally had an unnerving number of murders that could only be solved by one intrepid novelist. Charlie Cale is herself the magnet for murder and, after a while, the weightlessness of the series begins to sell both the character and Lyonne’s performance short. Even in one episode in which Charlie has a romantic entanglement with a victim, the embrace of darkness that was so intriguing in the first season is gone. Sure, Charlie Cale probably shouldn’t be perpetually progressing through stages of grief, but her quippy, constantly vaping joviality is head-scratching.
Rather than making even small structural or aesthetic leaps between different episodes, these 10 installments are fizzy and formulaic, offering the opportunity for lots of meta-commentary on television and film storytelling, but nothing that advances the conversation beyond what the first season provided.
It’s no surprise, then, that my favorite of these episodes was the sixth, “Sloppy Joseph,” in which the murder victim is a gerbil and Charlie has to face off against an eight-year-old Bad Seed, convincingly and amusingly played by Eva Jade Halford. It’s the only episode where I was never entirely certain how it would resolve or what its lesson would be for Charlie. Plus it features David Krumholtz — Slums of Beverly Hills reunion! — and Margo Martindale, so what’s not to like?
There are very good guest performances throughout, including Kumail Nanjiani as a Florida cop with an alligator sidekick, Sam Richardson as an aspiring screenwriter with a love for heist films, and Method Man as an enthusiastic gym owner. John Mulaney shows up and drinks a lot of milk, Simon Rex throws a baseball gamely and Katie Holmes is there, too, which is nice. There’s vocal continuity from Steve Buscemi, heard in multiple episodes, while Patti Harrison gets to make a repeat engagement as well.
What’s missing, though, is the kind of sit-up-and-take-notice performance that Nick Nolte gave in “The Orpheus Syndrome” or that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Stephanie Hsu provided in “Escape from Shit Mountain.” The imperative for this season’s lineup of guest stars seems to be “Come hang out with Natasha Lyonne for 10 days!” not “Here’s the chance to give a killer performance you’d never get to give in any other situation.”
And that, like Poker Face season two in general, is just fine. Maybe the problem isn’t achievement or aspiration, then, but expectations. Consider them realigned.
