There will be readers who do not remember who Lieutenant Colombo of the Los Angeles police homicide department was. He wore a trench coat, seemed always enveloped in the smoke of everything he smoked and, with Peter Falk’s folksy attitude in the role, he became a television icon. The format also differed from other murder series: the viewer first saw the murder and those responsible, and then the interest lay in seeing how Columbo solved the case before the homicidal minds. Taking into account that he aired episodes and specials between 1968 and 2003, it can be understood that his time on television was more than anecdotal. And, when you take a look at Poker face, which Showtime now has in its catalog, you instantly recognize that we have a conscious, updated and sophisticated heir to this lieutenant.
Charlie Cale is a waitress at a Las Vegas casino. She is not allowed to play because, as the owner of the establishment knows, she has a sixth sense: she knows when people are lying. She can overhear a conversation without meaning to, and if someone is lying, her instincts warn her. So, when her friend Natalie (Dascha Polanco) is murdered at the hands of the casino director’s hitman (Benjamin Bratt) (Adrien Brody), her sense of smell will lead her to investigate the crime. She, for the record, is not always aware of having the murderer in front of her: she simply tries to understand why the people around her lie and, upon discovering the truth, she is surprised. And she, episode by episode, embarks on a road trip in which, as if she were Jessica Fletcher from A Murder Wrote (the other reference of Poker Face), she finds corpses along the way wherever she goes.
The premise is not new, true, but the care with which the episodes are written, interpreted and produced is. Writer and director Rian Johnson (Daggers in the Back) met for dinner with actress Natascha Lyonne (Russian Doll) and came to the conclusion that murder series were the television Holy Grail: they allowed the story and characters to be renewed every week, giving them free rein so as not to repeat themselves. In the resulting work, Poker Face, you can see the interest in breaking away from expectations and treating each episode as a television event with its own essence, without falling into the formula, from the presentation of the characters to the topics that are addressed or the aroma that the places have with their respective communities, which lead to living a kind of trip with Charlie Cale.
Entering Poker Face means starting each episode as if it were a movie where, while the characters of the week are introduced, the viewer can consider what role each one will have, who will be the victim and who will be the murderer. And, once they are presented and the crime is shown, the viewer discovers how the protagonist is linked to the case as she travels across the United States. The names of Johnson and Lyonne weigh when it comes to finding the guest actors: Cherry Jones, Nick Nolte, Hong Chau, Chloë Sevigny, S. Epatha Merkerson, Ellen Barkin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Stephanie Hsu are splendid in a series that It offers them developed characters with moments to shine.
To say that Poker Face has a particular virtue is to miss the whole: the grainy image, the classic aesthetic without falling into nostalgia, the love that it openly professes for the audiovisual in an episode that pays homage to B movies, the control of the locations, the creation of characters, the intelligence when presenting the case and Charlie Cale introducing himself with grace, and Lyonne’s always casual and very personal attitude when creating her role. It is an achievement of successes that is also very pleasant. What more could you ask for than a mystery comedy that is always non-conformist, always in search of originality and ingenuity?
Poker face is already one of the cult series of 2023 after being broadcast between January and March in the United States. It is thanks to all these elements but above all for renewing a television genre, that of weekly murders, which cried out for someone to take it with affection.
