Poker Face

 While I fight anxiety about my city burning to the ground, I decided to pick up with a show I actually started while on the flight back from Boston (the fires in LA started while I was in the air).

Poker Face is created by Rian Johnson and stars Natasha Lyonne. It's a bit of an old-school murder mystery show in the tradition of Columbo. Unlike your typical mystery show, there's never a doubt to who committed the crime, because we start each episode with a lengthy cold-open from the killer's (or killers') perspective - only for each episode to reveal that Lyonne's character, Charlie, was actually there all along.

Then, each episode follows her as she finds the mistakes in the killer's plan and uncovers the truth.

One of the charms of the show, though, is that she's not a cop or even really a detective. Instead, she used to be a gambler who developed (or perhaps just possessed) an infallible talent for detecting when someone was lying. This is her main skill - she can always call bullshit when someone lies to her, and from there, she's able to piece together the crimes.

But she's also in trouble - I won't spoil the first episode, but its conclusion forces Charlie to head out on the road and stay on the run. This forces her into various odd scenarios, from assisting at a Texas barbecue to working the merch table for a band in the midwest.

The show plays perfectly to Lyonne's strengths, giving us a very likable detective who is also kind of a giant train-wreck of a human being. The show takes its time to humanize the victims - even if the cold opens might present the victims in less than flattering light, the subsequent rewind shows us why we should care that a person like this has been killed. There's a real ethos to this that sets it apart from most murder mysteries I tend to see, which often either make the victim out to be utterly unlikable (as in a lot of British small-town murder mysteries and Agatha Christie adaptations) or make them nothing but plot devices (as often happens in American police procedurals).

Charlie's predicament means she has to make human connections where she can, and in most of the episodes I've seen (the first four) she forges a bond with the victims.

Rian Johnson, of course, is a genre connoisseur, always eager to play with genre conventions and deconstruct or reconstruct them (his first feature, which I saw in college when it came out, was Brick, which was a pitch-perfect neo-noir that just so happened to be about high-school students). While Knives Out and Glass Onion have been his foray into Christie-style mysteries, as I mentioned before, Lyonne's Charlie is a detective more in the tradition of Peter Falk's.

Anyway, the guy is a meticulous storyteller, and Poker face blends fun mysteries with really solid humor (a scene in which a veterinarian shifts from professional mode to asking Charlie "what the fuck are you doing?" elicited probably the biggest laugh from me, if for nothing other than the flawless line reading.)

While the show is stuck on Peacock - a streaming service that my roommate happens to have thanks I think primarily to the fact that NBC's catalogue of sitcoms is still pretty top-shelf - I would recommend people find the opportunity to watch this one.