The best thing aboutPoker Faceis that it doesn’t bother trying to shore up what it knows is a flimsy premise. Fans of the first season will recall that Charlie Cale, Natasha Lyonne’s wisecracking 70s detective homage, has an in-built ability to detect a lie as soon as someone tells it. Instead of trying to explain this gift away as the result of a gamma storm or spider bite or covert government experiment, it now accepts that, yeah, she has a “freaky little lie detector trick”, that’s the extent of the idea, got a problem with that? These days, Charlie waves away any queries about it with an “Eh”, a shrug and a cheeky nudge of the baseball cap and aviator shades.
After using her talent to work her way through a series of increasingly preposterous case-of-the-week murders last time, then ending up with the mafia putting out a hit on her, Charlie begins the second season (starting 8 May, 9pm, Sky Max) on the lam once more, only now goons with guns keep popping up and shooting at her. For what could have been a high-concept show, Poker Face is surprisingly fuss-free about all of this, and barely lets a violent mob-based subplot get in the way of what Charlie does best. That is, wandering around small-town America, working out who is a killer and how/why they did it, then exposing them for their terrible crimes. She has to dodge bullets on occasion, sure, but she always keeps her eyes on the prize: coughing out the word “bullshit” and cracking the case.
Poker Face is created byKnives Outdirector Rian Johnson and, much like that franchise, it has become a place for A-listers to cut loose and be daft. The first episode featuresCynthia Erivo, and to get its money’s worth the show has her playing quintuplets, former child stars contesting the will of their recently deceased evil momager. Later, Katie Holmes pops up as the frustrated wife of a morbid funeral director, played by Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito, and Kumail Nanjiani goes all-in as an award-winning Florida cop who also happens to be a lot like the Tiger King, Joe Exotic. Best of all, Rhea Perlman returns as mob boss Beatrix Hasp, and she works so well with Lyonne that it’s a shame they couldn’t have done the whole season together.
There is a long-standing debate about whether comedy ever gets the praise it deserves. Funny films rarely win Oscars; funny shows regularly get pushed out of best comedy categories by “comedy” series that aren’t actually very funny at all (cough, The Bear). So it is immensely enjoyable to watch something like Poker Face, which is television of serious quality and precision that opts for comedy, wordplay and slapstick over the arid melancholy of serious drama. And while most TV likes to think it’s about the underdog, Poker Face actually walks the walk. Charlie’s life on the run rarely takes her to big cities. She tours towns and rural areas, working her way through the gig economy, getting by as an apple-picker, a car park attendant, even a corpse for hire. The only downside to season two is that it’s gone a bit industry: there are a couple of meta episodes about film sets and TV stars, but even when it goes there, it at least makes the story about the crew and the people doing the gruntwork.
Much like the shows it pays tribute to – Columbo and Murder, She Wrote – each episode of Poker Face works as a standalone story, with its own murder to solve, though it does take three episodes to wrap up last season’s cliffhanger and push off in its own direction. When it does, the story gets even sillier. It’s a rare show that makes you scribble down notes such as “meth alligator”, “shrimp-flavoured Vienna sausage” and “explosive vape”. The love of puzzles that fuelled the Knives Out whodunnits appears here, but it inverts the premise. It shows us who did it at the start, so there’s no mystery in that respect. The pleasure is in working backwards, and filling in the Charlie-based gaps, so we can figure out how she figures it out.
Lyonne and her swagger make Poker Face cool but, fundamentally, it’s Jonathan Creek with a love of 70s cinema – and I mean that as a compliment. Stylish and nerdy, witty and clever, it is rock-solid, hard-working entertainment.