Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne met for dinner. It was not a date but a meeting between two extraordinarily creative friends: you just have to remember that Johnson is the man behind the Daggers in the Back franchise and that Lyonne, after a youth damaged by drugs, knew how to return to the forefront of the industry as an actress thanks to Orange is the new black and she even claimed to be a creator with Russian Doll. Over steak and potatoes, they reminisced about the great case series on television. What a marvelous format with a peculiar and charismatic main character, the possibility of creating new scenarios in each episode and that they were satisfying hours of television for the viewer by having a beginning, a middle and a clear resolution in each episode. Why had this format been relegated to free-to-air television and streaming platforms, instead, only gave the green light to serialized content? Why did those responsible for producing Quality TV look down on this traditional format, which had historically given such good results?
A project emerged from that dinner: Poker Face. Johnson and Lyonne used their reputation for a platform to bet on the project in the United States, Peacock, the NBCUniversal streaming service. Johnson, after all, was the man who had reinvigorated Agatha Christie’s whodunnit with Daniel Craig’s detective Benoit Blanc, which did some fantastic box office numbers and his scripts were nominated for Oscars. He sold it, moreover, without bullshit: he informed the studio that he was going to produce a series that embraced its television nature and the episode as its primary narrative unit. And Lyonne, who serves as executive producer, director and writer, was going to play the lead. She is Charlie, a woman with the gift of perceiving people’s lies, which she ends up using as a tool to uncover crimes and find those responsible.
The first episode was also surprising for showing so clearly what is one of the main references of Poker Face. Charlie, a chain smoker and casino waitress, sets out to investigate the murder of her friend and co-worker (Dascha Polanco). The viewer, however, already knew who the perpetrators of the crime were: the business owner (Adrien Brody) and his right-hand man when it came to solving dirty laundry (Benjamin Bratt). Johnson’s script, therefore, did not have its main attraction in the process of discovering the identity of the murderer as in Daggers in the Back, but followed the classic scheme of Colombo, the detective played by Peter Falk, and his interest resided in see both Charlie’s inquiries and understand the full context of the case and follow the movements of the culprits.
In a television model that prioritizes the creation of cliffhangers to keep the viewer in front of the screen and favor the marathon, its creator only set out to “make each episode as satisfying as possible” with the hope that quality was the reason to return the following week. He himself stated that, while series like Quantum leap (Through time) had a serialized claim in the background, in reality the viewer returned to discover a new setting, a new case, some new characters.
Luckily for Johnson and Lyonne, both critics and the public have bought them “a family structure, a central character that you want to come back to spend with him for a while”: the series enters the Nielsen list every month that studies consumption television in the United States. Not bad considering that Peacock has around 20 million customers in that market, as opposed to Netflix which has over 70 million.
According to media critics, this revitalization of the formula with guest actors such as Ron Perlman, Hong Chau, Chloë Sevigny, Ellen Barkin, Simon Hellberg, Stephanie Hsu, Nick Nolte or Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a treat. It has a near perfect 99% approval on Rotten Tomatoes and has a remarkably high on Metacritic at 84%. “Poker Face is meant to be as comfortingly familiar as Russian Doll was novel and challenging,” Inkoo Kang wrote in The New York Times, “but the show still evokes as much charisma and surprise as it can within its highly thought-out formula.”
It is, in short, an ideal series for anyone thinking of quality historical television and the aforementioned detective Colombo or that A Murder Has Written that came to be nominated for an Emmy for best drama series three times ( and without needing to despise the character of Angela Lansbury for always finding a corpse wherever she goes).
The only problem with this groundbreaking series precisely because it looks at the past with respect and veneration (and doing it with the privilege of Johnson and Lyonne, who infuse it with personality, charisma, originality, ideas and a budget) is that, as the spoiling headline indicates, , has no one to issue it in Spain. It was shocking, in fact, that SkyShowtime, the service participated by NBCUniversal, did not arrive with Poker Face in its catalog. And given the proposal, maybe it’s time someone solved this puzzle.
