America is in its throwback era! People tend to mention that these days in the context of concern rather than celebration, but, looking on the bright side, this reacharound to the past brings with it the return of flared jeans, and those look good on just about everybody!
Old-school network TV is back—retrofitted for the streaming age. It’s not just the return of weekly releases, but of familiar formats. New shows that look like classic ones—like “Poker Face,” returning for its second season on Throwback Thursdays, no less.
Streaming ignited a career resurgence for its star Natasha Lyonne (“Russian Doll”), whose citizen detective Charlie Cale is a walking, talking encyclopedia of ‘60s and ‘70s iconography, tooling the country in her worn but still handsome 1969 Plymouth Barracuda. She smokes, she drinks and she can’t resist trouble despite her determination to avoid it.
Lyonne naturally channels the late Peter Falk’s halting way of speaking, but her crime solver’s innate talent for picking out lies makes her unique. In a wide-open land founded and fueled by grifters and fabulists, the woman who is allergic to B.S. is . . . not exactly queen, but a welcome visitor and useful friend.
Natasha Lyonne and John Mulaney in “Poker Face” (Peacock). “Poker Face” pleasurably honors the timeless utility of the one-and-done procedural format even as its creator Rian Johnson (“Knives Out”) uses each episode’s mysteries to pay tribute to great films and film greats. Lyonne’s gravel quarry of a voice and hipster-hunched posture are the only cast regulars in a show that draws all the big names to play.
Within the first three episodes, Cynthia Erivo, Katie Holmes, Giancarlo Esposito, Rhea Perlman and John Mulaney all land on Charlie’s map, continuing last season’s A-lister parade. Star caliber is nice and all, but the guest cast’s notoriety primarily makes for good promotion. One of the oldest rules in the medium is that TV makes its stars, not the other way around. Of course, fewer of them would agree to do this show if it weren’t good and a good time.
This makes “Poker Face” a creative coup in the post-prestige television age, especially when so many series trying to approximate premium auteur storytelling only look the part. Johnson’s show respects the audience and what they want from the small screen, and Lyonne’s grungy heroine.
While Season 2 picks up after the more serialized first season’s cliffhanger, newcomers can easily get the gist of what’s going on. In summary, Charlie is a Las Vegas cocktail waitress who goes on the lam after she calls B.S. on the wrong person: her mobbed-up boss. By the end of Season 1, she’s run afoul of five rival crime bosses, particularly her dead former boss’ rival Beatrix Hasp (Perlman).
Katie Holmes and Natasha Lyonne in “Poker Face” (Sarah Shatz/Peacock). The second season premiere finds Charlie still living in her car and scraping by on odd jobs, only now she’s dodging Beatrix’s hitmen and their bullets. (In one of the season’s funnier moments, she complains about that to her tormentor, who replies, “Ah Jesus, you Millennials – b**ch, b**ch, b**ch!”)
Watching Lyonne’s heroine tap dance away from strafing fire gets old pretty fast, but at least Johnson and his writers realize that. Within the first three episodes, which premiere in a single drop, the holdovers from Charlie’s old life resolve, and her story becomes as open as the country is wide.
It’s been a very long while since a show featuring a rootless protagonist managed to keep its edge and relatability without doing itself in with narrative drift. But then, Charlie Cale also fulfills a benevolent kind of fantasy of real freedom. She’s debt-free, has few possessions, gets along with decent people and doesn’t need much to be happy. Charlie has much in common with Jack Reacher, minus his penchant for extralegal slaughter.
This show uses its stars to affectionately poke at roadside Americana with a winking artistic intellect.
Instead, the murders happen around her, and for quotidian reasons. The game of “Poker Face” allows us to see who commits the crimes and how; it’s up to Charlie to figure out what happened based on what people tell her. She favors helping working-class grunts and tends to take down killers who knock off people for entirely average reasons — money, fame or property.
One late-season episode gratifyingly breaks the mold, centering on an overly eager elementary school apple-polisher who . . . well, let’s not spoil it. But it’s worth singling out Eva Jade Halford for her comedic and unsettling turn as the episode’s main guest star, playing a coddled devil child. Her performance is just one of many surprises that highlight the show’s ability to flaunt its cleverness without smothering it in celebrity schmaltz.
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On the contrary, this show uses its stars to affectionately poke at roadside Americana with a winking artistic intellect. “Poker Face” doesn’t just take us to a cop conference, but makes sure we notice its cover band is called Yolo Tomassi, a parodic “L.A. Confidential” reference to a name that sparks one of the best poker face reactions in all of cinema.
Cynthia Erivo in “Poker Face” (Sarah Shatz/Peacock). Then again, maybe that’s a popcorn kernel for critics and other nerds, like another episode’s throwaway line from a former journalist who says she got blackballed for sucker-punching Rex Reed. Other jokes trade in more broadly-appealing cleverness; for example, that same brief frame at the cop con show featuring Yola Tomassi singing “Frisk and Shout” in the style of The Beatles.
It’s the little cues that make “Poker Face” a TV comfort quilt, joining highbrow humor and an accessible tone, with Lyonne’s benevolent energy and rumpled chic holding it all together. You may want Charlie to stay on her summer road trip forever, and she just might. For now, it is enough that the show gives us 10 superb reasons to sit with it, appreciating how sturdy some entertainment styles and mechanics that worked decades ago remain even now, when the right hands are on the wheel.
Season 2 of “Poker Face” premieres with three episodes Thursday, May 8, on Peacock.
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