Natasha Lyonne plays a brilliantly rumpled crime solver in Knives Out creator Rian Johnson’s new murder-of-the-week show, writes Caryn James.
Take a look at any episode of the old detective show Columbo and you’ll notice that the title’s yellow letters and font are precisely echoed in Rian Johnson’s Poker Face. Columbo is its main inspiration, and Poker Face, like its inspiration, is sly, easy, escapist fun. But, as with his character-driven whodunit films Knives Out and Glass Onion, Johnson has designed this show with a keen sense of how to modernise nostalgia. His homage to murder-of-the-week shows still works today, though the shambolic hero played by Peter Falk has been replaced by a croaky-voiced heroine with wild hair and a mobile phone.
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Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie, an unintentional crime solver with an uncanny ability to look someone in the eyes and tell when they’re lying – a useful skill whether she’s gambling at cards, her former profession, or running into murderers at every turn on the road, which is where the series takes her. We see the crime first, as in Columbo and many Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, and then we see Charlie figure it all out. “The real trick is determining why, why someone is lying,” she says.
Lyonne brings the same wry sensibility and delivery to her other roles, most recently as the time-shifting heroine in Netflix’s Russian Doll. However, intuitive, kind-hearted Charlie may be the most likeable, least acerbic character she has ever played, someone who can carry a series. Following in the footsteps of Columbo, she drives a beat-up car and is misunderstood by criminals – played by a rotating cast of guest stars – who are duped by her ostensibly innocent, confused questions.
The first episode, written and directed by Johnson, is one of the best. The murder takes place in a garish Las Vegas-style hotel and casino, and the episode is shot in the style of a 1970s television show, complete with saturated colours and ominous music cues. Johnson wisely drops the playful look for more cinematic approaches in later instalments. He understands how far to take a formula and when to abandon it. (With the third episode, other writers and directors take over.)
In the first story, a hotel maid (Dasha Polanco) discovers a horrifying image on a guest’s computer and alerts the hotel manager, played with perfect smarminess by Adrien Brody. Creating the show’s pattern, Around 20 minutes in, Charlie appears, and the timeline shifts back to before the murder, with scenes explaining why she was there in the first place. She appears here as a cocktail waitress wearing a silly feathered hat.
It’s enough to say that something goes wrong, and Charlie is forced to flee, with the casino’s hitman (Benjamin Bratt) pursuing her. Bratt’s character provides the series with some continuity and a reason for Charlie to travel around under the radar, working as a waitress or a cleaner in order to stay one step ahead of the killer.
The guests are not mega movie stars, but familiar faces. In one episode, Chloe Sevigny, who played Lyonne’s character’s mother in Russian Doll’s flashbacks, stars as Ruby Ruin, a has-been singer in a metal band, now working at a warehouse. She gets the band back together and goes on the road, with Charlie selling their T-shirts. Like the Knives Out mysteries, Poker Face walks the line between straightforward and tongue-in-cheek, but where the films land on the campier side, the series is more invested in its plots. No detail is too small or silly to be a clue or a red herring, including the title of the metal band’s one hit, Staplehead.
Lil Rel Howery plays the co-owner of a Texas barbecue restaurant, whose brother wants to quit the business, saying, “I’m going vegan”. Wit always takes precedence over seriousness here. Someone falls off a roof at a rest stop in New Mexico, where Charlie meets a trucker played by Hong Chau (The Whale). She later works at a retirement home and befriends 1970s radicals gleefully played by Judith Light and S Epatha Merkerson.
One other nostalgic touch: like those old series, Poker Face is not necessarily made to binge. It’s there, ready whenever you feel like a reassuring, cosy mystery that’s more rumpled crime-solver than Miss Marple.
Why cop show Homicide: Life on the Street was revolutionary
The Wire is considered a high point in TV history, but it owed a lot to another series involving creator David Simon, writes Natasha Tripney – this gritty drama about Baltimore’s homicide unit.
When the first episode of Homicide: Life on the Street aired on the US network NBC on January 31, 1993, it looked like nothing else on television at the time.
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The series was based on David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which documented his time spent with the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit; Simon would go on to create The Wire, which is still regarded as one of the best TV dramas ever made, but having started his career as a reporter, he made his name with this vividly written account of his time shadowing a shift of homicide detectives as they investigated murders in 1988. The show, like his book, captured the day-to-day reality and often grim humour of a group of people whose job puts them in constant contact with death.