Poker Face takes one of the oldest TV formats — the murder-of-the-week perfected by Columbo more than half a century ago — and uses it as a starting line for endless innovation.
Its second season just kicked off with Cynthia Erivo playing five different roles, and continues with stories of death-by-alligator and elementary-school deception. Creator Rian Johnson and star Natasha Lyonne take stories that start like episodes of The A-Team or Magnum, P.I. or Murder, She Wrote, add influences like Philip Marlowe and Jeff Bridges’ The Dude from The Big Lebowski, then dazzle us with an array of rug pulls and twists and clues in plain sight.
It’s comforting and confusing, all at once — good-old-fashioned TV transmogrified for social-media attention spans.
None of which is what’s most intriguing about Poker Face.
What stands out, in our era of battling cartoon versions of each other online, is that its heroine actually goes out and talks to people. Lyonne’s character, Charlie Cale, lives out of her car while traveling the country, working a series of low-paying jobs, and fleeing mob assassins.
“One thing that we’ve landed on with the show is Charlie, going around the nation, going to all these corners of it, all these little pockets of of the country, and having an unflagging empathy for every single person she meets, and being open to a conversation with anyone she’s sitting down next to — and just the basicness of she’s a decent person who likes people,” says Johnson.
“She’s going from coast to coast, and in every person she meets, she’s starting a conversation as if they could be a new friend. And honestly, for me, that feels kind of like a real tonic right now. It’s not a social message. But I do feel like it’s something that is specific to this show that I think is really genuinely valuable right now.”
Lyonne adds: “I love that it’s not like a coastal, elite show — that it’s sort of like a real everyman sort of thing. I just think it is a really special, healthy, wholesome message about how to move through life.
“It’s almost like that idea of ‘We’ll lose interest in ourselves and gain interest in our fellows,’ or something like that.”
That quote is paraphrasing one of the 12 Promises taken on by participants in Alcoholic Anonymous: “We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.” AA is a group with no hierarchy, financial requirements or incentives, or political affiliation. It emphasizes people solving problems, face-to-face, while acknowledging that we are all, in core ways, the same. It’s about helping each other, not judging.
On Poker Face, Charlie never judges — with one big exception. She has a remarkable ability to suss out lies, and uses it to solve murders. Which happen every week on Poker Face.
But the big-picture message stands: You never get to learn interesting stuff, good and bad, unless you really take time to get to know people.
Natasha Lyonne on Poker Face — and Plumbing
In 2009, Lyonne starred alongside Tyne Daley — a veteran of both Columbo and Cagney & Lacey, another Poker Face reference point — in an off-Broadway production of Love, Loss and What I Wore. Lyonne and Daly became poker buddies, and Lyonne recalls some advice she got from her TV elder.
“She would say, ‘Listen, kid — you want to be the walking wounded, or you want to be a good soldier? A plumber plumbs, and then he comes home and he turns on the TV, and then it’s your time for plumbing. And there’s no difference between what you do and what he does. And, you know — that’s entertainment.’”
Lyonne adds: “Showbiz is so solipsistic, but it’s actually the job — to kind of give people some relief at the end of their fuckin’ day.”
When you talk to Lyonne, you often find yourself looking things up later. The word “solipsistic” refers to extreme egotism, and is based on the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind can be proven to exist.
It is the opposite, you could say, of interest in our fellows.
Poker Face aired its first season in 2023, and was born of Johnson watching many episodes of Columbo when the Knives Out mastermind was on Covid lockdown. The show feels in some ways like an open-road pandemic fantasy: Stuck inside, addicted to our screens, many of us promised ourselves that if we were ever allowed out again, we would savor every face-to-face interaction.
Of course that isn’t how it worked out. All that time online made many of us cagier, more suspicious of the world outside our bubbles. It’s easier than it’s ever been to believe the people outside our circle are ignorant, psychotic or deranged — if not malicious and cruel. (I once made many bad assumptions about a stranger at the airport based on his old-school Little Mermaid shirt, and still think I’m probably right.)
It’s also easy to assume any film or TV show is the work of elites, especially if the show is stocked with A-list guests, the product of a major corporation, and shot mainly in the vincinity New York City. All those things are true of Poker Face, sure. But to call a show or movie elitist is to ignore all the blue-collar people crucially involved in making it, to overlook that artists tend to live and die for empathy, and to forget that the people at the top weren’t always at the top.
The showrunner of the second season, Tony Tost, was born in the Ozarks, then moved with his single mother to an old mining town in Washington state. He grew up in trailers, and his mother and stepfather were custodians at his school.
He related closely to an episode in Season 2 about a student whose dad is the school custodian — as did a Poker Face writer whose mom was also a school custodian, and another writer whose mom was a lunch lady.
“There’s a little bit, in the room, of class consciousness in that way,” says Tost. “Not necessarily the normal Hollywood perspectives.”
After graduating high school, Tost worked at a pickle factory — “and realized that was maybe not my long term career that I wanted,” he says. He honed his love of writing in community college, and with years of work became a highly admired young poet. He earned his MFA at the University of Arkansas and PhD at Duke — “to kind of try to make up for lost time.”
“I would alternate between my academic career and working,” he explains. “I worked cleaning condos. I worked as a janitor, I worked at restaurants, I worked counting traffic — lots of these kind of entry-level, kind of minimum wage jobs to kind of get through and then I decided to try my hand at screenwriting.”
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One of his old University of Arkansas classmates happened to be Nic Pizzolatto, a novelist who was working on AMC’s The Killing and would soon go on to create HBO’s phenemomenal True Detective. He encouraged Tost’s screenwriting.
“In my arrogance and kind of naivety, I was just like, ‘Well, fuck, if Nic can do it — Nic doesn’t have any connections — I can do it too,” Tost recalls.
Pizzolatto shared Tost’s work with his agents, which eventually led to Tost getting his first TV jobs in his mid-30s. He worked on A&E’s Longmire, then created his own show, USA’s Damnation, in 2017. He later worked on AMC’s The Terror, and made his feature directorial debut, Lionsgate’s Americana, when it premiered at SXSW in 2023. (It is due in theaters this summer.)
Tost watched admiringly when Poker Face debuted.
“I had nothing to do with the first season, but I loved that Charlie shows up in kind of underseen, non-aspirational, little pockets of America, and she’s drawn not to the people who have power, who have money, have status, but just the normal kind of working people. And it’s never condescending, it’s never pitying. It’s just like, yeah, these people are just living their lives. Charlie connects with them, and they’re kind of the the default lens on the world, as opposed to the high-status people. And that was a big draw to the show for me.”
Rian Johnson on Making Poker Face Look Easy
Poker Face has, fittingly enough, a good poker face: If it’s under stress, you’ll never see it. The show has an easy, soft-denim charm that allows you to enjoy all those Erivos and plot twists and setups and surprises without ever thinking about how hard they must be to pull off. Nevermind the logistics of bringing in guests every week who this season include Katie Holmes, Giancarlo Esposito, Awkwafina, Clifford “Method Man” Smith, Justin Theroux, Taylor Schilling, Kumail Nanjiani, Melanie Lynskey, Rhea Perlman and many, many more.
“You want people to just have a good time when they watch it,” Johnson says. “But I mean, it’s true — you put a lot of work into into hiding the sweat that goes into it.”
The show is unusually ambitious in that Lyonne is the only cast member in every episode, and it changes locations every single week, which creates an especially daunting series of challenges for the crew.
“There’s no crime lab to cut back to. There’s no hero’s apartment to cut back to,” says Johnson. “One week is a baseball field. The next week is a grade school. The next week is an alligator. There’s no place to hide.”
He adds: “When we started pitching this, I was like, ‘Why don’t people make this kind of single-camera, case-of-the-week, on-the-road show anymore?’
“And then as soon as we started making it, I was like, ‘Oh.’”
Lyonne and Johnson offer specific praise of many on their team, including Judy Rhee, a veteran of Better Call Saul and Jessica Jones who must create vastly different settings every week, and executive producer Jeffrey Bernstein, a Sopranos vet with a gift for wrangling A-list guests.
“He’s like, ‘No, no, John Mulaney, you’re not going to Hawaii for your birthday. Cancel your plans,” laughs Lyonne.
Poker Face is now streaming on Peacock.
Main image: Natasha Lyonne in Poker Face. Peacock.