Poker Face: new TV series that could be better than Columbo

Natasha Lyonne is an amateur sleuth who calls bulls..t in the series Poker Face. And it could be her most memorable role yet

Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale in Poker Face

Let me introduce you to Poker Face if you haven’t discovered her already. Now to have one is to assume a blank, impassive expression that gives no indications of your thoughts or intentions. The expression is derived from poker players determined not to give their opponents any clues about the cards they hold.

In this totally beguiling, highly entertaining new series the expression is used somewhat ironically to describe our heroine Charlie, played brilliantly by an irrepressible Natasha Lyonne, in a show created by the seemingly omnipresent Rian Johnson of Knives Out and Glass Onion fame.

And if his films have a referential throwback quality to them, paying homage to the cinema he grew up with, his first TV series is a deliriously witty return to the episodic shows of the past that he also watched as a kid, when he devoured stories that gave him something different each week.

And while it’s an unashamed homage to a lost age of TV it has contemporary edge to spare and as much cinematic style as any show on TV. Lyonne’s performance as a tough, bruised around-the-edges New Yorker with a gift of the gab, especially after too many coffees, will have you coming back week after week just to be in her tousled, streetwise company.

Johnson still remembers “sitting on the carpet in front of the TV in the family living room and watching reruns during the day of those hour-long, you know, kind of procedural dramas and mystery shows.”

Dramas like Murder, She Wrote, The Rockford Files, Magnum, P.I., The Fugitive, and especially Columbo are the inspiration for Poker Face, a series co-created with the magical Lyonne.

If you are unfamiliar with her, she’s one of the ensemble cast of Orange is the New Black but really found fame with Netflix’s Russian Doll, which is a kind of existential New York comedy, conceived as a four-hour movie that asks what you would do if you knew death was imminent and suddenly there’s a chance to do everything in your life over again.

Lyonne stars as Nadia Vulvokov, a chain-smoking, loud and boisterous New York-based game designer, who is adored by her many friends even though she’s abrupt, moody and abrasive. She keeps dying or being killed only to resurface each time in the same bathroom.

In Poker Face she plays Charlie Cale, and like Peter Falk’s stogie-smoking Columbo, she is no ordinary detective. As is the case in that classic procedural cop show, we first see the murder and then watch the star bring the killer to justice (this is known as the Inverted Detective Story structure, the lead character absent in the first act while we see how the murder was committed and the alibi constructed).

And as in The Fugitive, Charlie is constantly on the run. She is hunted by a killer and turns up in a new place in every episode with a new drama with new protagonists. (Of course, like so many detective heroes of the past she also has a classic car; in Charlie’s case it’s a blue Plymouth Barracuda, which in a running joke is often difficult to start.)

Charlie’s a chatty, affable, naturally social person, with a highly developed sense of righteousness. Innately she can pick the good people from the many she meets and carries with her a distinctive sense of right and wrong. The thing is too, Charlie likes people, actually likes them – Johnson calls it “a sunny, open arms sort of attitude towards people in the world”.

She’s chosen her itinerant way of life – her home at least at the start, a rumpled, unkempt trailer raised on cinder blocks – because honour and integrity mean more to her than fame or fortune. Asked if she would like to be rich, she replies, “I been rich.” Asked further how that was, she says, “Easier than being broke; harder than doing just fine.” Her voice is so catarrhal the words seem to only just manage to emerge from her throat.

In spite of her sometimes best wishes, she’s constantly involved in a quest for justice; once started nothing can turn her around. “I see ­bull­-s--t; I say bulls--t,” she says. “It’s a thing I have.” She is constantly outraged and somewhat obsessed with the internet’s accounts of the way Russian kiddie porn rings can be easily found on the Dark Web.

Intensely sensitive, she carries a shield of cynical apathy. She is always affecting a wise-guy coolness and with whatever comes her way exercises a veneer of taut self-control, sarcasm and indifference, a can of Coors Light rarely absent from her small hands.

She’s a kind of zany version of the hard-boiled detective, more so than Columbo really, who was after all a cop. Charlie is an amateur sleuth with her own eccentric moral code, helpless to keep from butting into situations where people are being taken advantage of, or exploited. Criminality just seems to find her. “I think in another life you were, like, a knight,” a friend tells her. “Lady Galahad.”

But it’s not that she really wants to be involved, says Johnson. The writers had to find an emotional reason for her to be tangled up in each mystery. “That was a challenge, but it also means that every time she gets involved, it’s actually against her better judgment,” he says. “That’s because she’s seeing the little guy get screwed, and she can’t let it go – and that’s a really endearing quality.”

But like so many hard-boiled detectives her very commonness – she’s ferociously untidy, her hair a mess, and she thinks nothing of buying six packs of beer at the local in her pyjamas – is a mask for uncommon qualities.

Of course, she has this gift. Charlie is special. She possesses a non-supernatural ability, kind of like a superpower though she remains rather disdainful of it. She can tell when a person is lying, though it’s a skill she’s learned how to control, given that people lie constantly mostly about stupid, everyday things. As she says it’s kind of like birds chattering in the background. As Lyonne says, given Charlie has been this way as a kid, she’s figured out a way to almost hide it.

Johnson says they had to set rules as to when she uses this ability. “We had to define this really clearly for ourselves and the rules that we landed are, she can tell if someone says something out loud that they know is an intentional lie,” Johnson says. “If someone says something that’s untrue, but they think that it’s the truth, that will read as truth to her. It’s entirely just if someone says something that’s a lie. The interesting obstruction with that is, how do you do a mystery series where someone has that gift and the show isn’t over in five minutes?” Complicated sure, but clear in the way the show works.

In the first episode “Dead Man’s Hand”, written and directed by Johnson and photographed by his long term collaborator Steve Yeldin, we discover Charlie after she’s been caught out. This is after cutting a haphazard path across the middle of the country successfully using her mental skills at the poker table. The word goes round that she’s playing with an almost supernatural individuality, like she was “seeing through the cards”. She’s busted by a Reno casino magnate who offers her a hostess job on the promise she’ll never use her gift again at the tables. Her life is on the line.

When Reno retires his ambitious son takes over the operation having learned of Charlie’s secret. The son’s name is Sterling and he is played brilliantly by a gravelly-voiced Adrien Brody doing a masterful impersonation of vintage Robert De Niro. Sterling wants Charlie to scam one of the casino’s high rollers, Kazimir Caine (Eddie Gorodetsky), who is highly regarded by his father no less, using her lie-detecting power.

After taking her cut she can disappear without a trace. But she’s quickly involved in a murder mystery at the casino after her friend, hotel maid Natalie Hill (Dascha Polanco) is viciously killed after finding a horrifying image on Caine’s computer while cleaning his room. Soon Charlie is on the run pursued by the casino owner’s right hand man, the brutal Cliff (Benjamin Bratt in an awesome tough guy performance).

It’s beautifully done. Yeldin’s colour palette is nicely reminiscent of early TV shows; his idiosyncratic framing is more resonant of quirky contemporary dramas such as Better Call Saul. It is highly inventive and always nuanced to character. And Nathan Johnson’s music is superb in the way it mixes old Sam Cooke favourites with a banjo-inspired theme for Charlie. The music uses those wonderful plangent chords and invokes a kind of Americana at times, while at other moments turning foreboding and menacing.

Charlie you are so welcome, just keep running, girl.

Poker Face streaming on Stan.
Russian Doll streaming on Netflix.