Johnson, Lyonne channel old ‘Columbo’ magic in ‘Poker Face’
A cut above the best, the Peacock murder mystery series “Poker Face” scratches all my old-school “Columbo” itches — and does it without putting a police detective at the center. Natasha Lyonne stars as a cocktail waitress on the run from a casino boss. She’s driving cross country with no real destination in mind, stumbling upon crimes at every pit stop.
Talkative and droll, she can clock a bluff. A useful skill until heavies in the gambling world catch on. But once she’s on the lam, those qualities plus a moral compass make her a lively detective stand-in.
She’s nosy and curious enough to unravel these various crimes without even meaning to. She’s just asking questions, see? Because the party line doesn’t make sense. The lies are everywhere. She’d much rather lay low, take the occasional short-term job and keep her head down. But there’s a dead body. And suspicious circumstances. She can’t help herself. So there she is, sussing things out with an offbeat quizzicalness that’s not unlike her aforementioned spiritual predecessor.
The show comes from Rian Johnson, the writerdirector of “Knives Out” and “Glass Onion,” both of which I liked fine. I think he has found a stronger way into the genre with “Poker Face.” The movies, to me, spend too much time winking at whodunit conventions rather than unlocking what makes them tick.
The Peacock series takes a smarter approach by embracing the tropes while slightly reworking them to land on a scratchy-piquant humor all its own.
As with “Columbo,” each episode begins with the crime itself. We already know whodunit, leaving us with a wily game of catand-mouse as Lyonne’s human lie detector pieces together the truth behind all these artful falsehoods and misdirections.
It’s a stacked list of guest
stars: Adrien Brody as a man looking to fleece a high roller; Chloe Sevigny as a one-hit wonder angling for a rock star comeback; Lil Rel Howery as a crooked BBQ entrepreneur; S. Epatha Merkerson and Judith Light as pot-smoking ex-radicals; Benjamin Bratt as the enigmatic casino muscle who’s on her trail. Everyone’s playing it just larger-than-life, which works in terrific contrast to Lyonne’s offhanded energy.
These are crimes borne of greed or revenge or just an empty hole in someone’s gut where their soul used to be. The deep flaws of humanity are on display, and yet the show never slips into the grim. Tonally, it is a sly mix of absurdist humor and bad impulses.
You need a consistent and entertaining center to keep things grounded, and Lyonne’s shrugging charismatic performance is as deft as they come. How does she manage to have chemistry with everyone? I don’t know, but she does.
The character’s a drifter and a solo artist who is constantly asked: Married? Kids? (She’s not thinking about it, why is anybody else?) Left unexamined is her worldview. She embodies a light cynicism that suggests she might be skeptical of institutions of power. Or not. The show is surprisingly vague on this point.
For the most part, “Poker Face” gingerly sidesteps around the messiness of copaganda altogether. If there’s unexpected playfulness in the case-of-theweek format, it also gives an otherwise aimless character a sense of purpose.
Early on, someone asks Lyonne’s character: What is it like, always knowing the truth?
“Eh, yeah, no — I only know if something is a lie. And outside of poker, it’s less useful than you’d think. ’Cause everyone? They lie constantly. It’s like birds chirping.”
It’s everywhere, all the time, and usually about meaningless stuff.
“The real trick of it is to figure out why.”