Just as it is true that the formula of a crime procedural can become predictable, so too can a reviewer of the procedural become somewhat familiar. A couple weeks ago, when “The Big Pump” aired, I was pleased and surprised to get name-checked in a review of the same episode over at The A.V. Club by Noel Murray. Noel noted how I like to recommend episodes of Columbo when I review episodes of Poker Face, largely because this show has been nakedly obvious about the creative debt it owes to Peter Falk’s exploits back in the 1970s.

But just as the last couple episodes of Poker Face have attempted to upend its formula, I figure I might as well do the same this week.1 Not only am I taking the recommendation out of the Stray Observations, I’m not even going to recommend an episode of Columbo this week. Technically, it’s not even a recommendation as much as an allusion, but an apt one, nonetheless. See, about a third of the way through “The End of the Road,” I was thinking of the season-one finale of the BBC show Sherlock. If you haven’t seen the show, a) you should (at least the first season), and b) let me briefly explain why I was thinking of “The Great Game.”

Although the Steven Moffat-created update of the Sherlock Holmes stories is proudly modern, it does hit a lot of familiar beats. Sherlock (then played by Benedict Cumberbatch, in the role that helped vault him into stardom) is mercurial: he’s half-crazy, he’s incredibly intelligent, and of course, he has his good friend Watson. As played by Martin Freeman, this John Watson is far from the avuncular comic-relief figure of the old-school Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone, but still not as sharp as Sherlock even as he deals with PTSD from his time in the Iraq War. In “The Great Game,” we finally meet the yang to Sherlock’s yin: James Moriarty.

If you do recall “The Great Game,” you recall that the tense final scene—set at night at a deserted gym—allows Sherlock to meet Moriarty for the first time. And for a brief moment, Sherlock thinks the mysterious Moriarty is none other than…John Watson. Now, within the confines of Sherlock, Watson is exactly who we expect Watson to be; he’s not actually Moriarty, but has been rigged up to explosives and is being told to speak to Sherlock as if he is Moriarty. But Moriarty is someone else entirely (and played by Andrew Scott, quite well). Moffat faking out the audience is maybe a cheap trick, but listen…you would be a bit surprised if Sherlock’s best friend was actually his worst enemy, right?

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Last week, I noted that it was inevitable that one day, Charlie Cale would stop roaming around so much. I mentioned that one day, she would finally stop moving from place to place like a bullfrog, and settle down (such as it is in a show like this). And last week’s episode proved that to be true. Even as Charlie and her new friend Alex ran afoul of a muscle-bound murderer, and even with the frustration of making the other tenants in a Brooklyn apartment building mad at her, our heroine had found a place to set up roots of some kind.

I suppose, though, it was also inevitable that one day, this show would have to look right in the (glass) eye at the elephant in the room. You may not be aware, but Poker Face is partially inspired by 1970s-era procedurals like Columbo. I’m sure I haven’t mentioned that, oh, every week in these reviews. (Ahem.) It was fairly evident early on that this episode was not being terribly coy with references to the show or Peter F…

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I suppose it was always inevitable that Charlie Cale would allow herself to stop moving from place to place for once. Earlier this season on Poker Face, Charlie seemed to very clearly long for the potential of finding somewhere to live in the long term, instead of somewhere to hang out briefly. When Charlie raised that potential to Good Buddy, though, it felt like a pipe dream because of how she keeps stumbling into murder scenes. Now, even though Charlie can’t help but get involved in deathly matters, I couldn’t help but wonder in past episodes why she had to leave certain locations. Did Charlie have to leave behind the Montgomery Cheesemongers after solving the death of a hot new baseball player, for example? She chose to, yes, but did she have to?

And more to the point, did Charlie have to stay in New York? Now, NYC is massive, so there are plenty of different sub-communities in which …

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What would Charlie Cale look like if she wasn’t so good-hearted? That, in essence, is the question asked by “A New Lease on Death,” an episode that brings our heroine to the heart of New York City. Consider the details we know about Amelia Peek, AKA Kate Forster (Alia Shawkat). She’s moved around the country, she knows how to fend for herself, she’s pretty comfortable confronting old and young, men and women alike, and she’s out for herself more than anyone else. We don’t get Amelia/Kate saying to Charlie something like that old cliché, “We’re not so different, you and I,” but there’s only so much daylight between these two women.

Charlie Cale, of course, doesn’t kill anyone to get by. She floats on the breeze and lands where the world takes her. That she would finally make her way to New York City feels inevitable (as do the Woody Allen-style opening credits this week). “A New Lease on Death,” of course, spends little time establishing a number of potential situatio…

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Sometimes, the most enjoyable parts of a formulaic TV show are when the people making that show choose to zig instead of zag. Formula-shifting installments can take many forms, whether it’s because a show does a bottle episode or an ensemble show focuses just on one character for a specific hour. For Poker Face, a show that has taken many (if not all) of its dramatic cues from procedurals like Columbo, perhaps the easiest way to upend the formula is simple. What if there was an episode of Poker Face where no one gets murdered? What if there’s no mystery for Charlie Cale to solve?

Thus, we have “The Sleazy Georgian,” an hour that feels very much in keeping with the work of Rian Johnson, and yet one that is very different from other episodes of Poker Face. Now, it is true that there is a death in this episode, but a) it’s off-screen and b) it’s a tragic suicide. Moreover, there’s no mystery to uncover once we learn who killed themselves, because …

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If there is anything I wish I could ask Rian Johnson about the creation of Poker Face, it’s simple: “Why choose to impose upon yourself a short runtime?” Now, I have harped about this general issue in my past reviews here, but I don’t know that I’ve felt that question as deeply as I did while watching “One Last Job,” which starts off the second half of this show’s second season. I noted earlier in the season that, based on an interview with Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone, Johnson seems to be feeling the strain of making an episodic series compared to his excellent Benoit Blanc films. (I’m inferring that from the interview, to be clear, but the vibes from that interview were hard to ignore.)

And one way that strain may be more notable is in the runtimes. Although the season’s premiere episode ran close to an hour, the last few installments have all been around 45 minutes, which is awfully close to the standard runtime of an hourlong…

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I will be honest with you all: after I watched last week’s episode of Poker Face, I broke my own rule and I immediately watched “Sloppy Joseph.” Now, if you watched “Hometown Hero” and patiently read through my long-winded baseball chatter, you know that the episode did not end with some jaw-dropping cliffhanger or unexpected twist. So you may wonder what prompted me to keep playing the episode. Just as the show has begun to slowly answer the question “What if Charlie’s not on the run from the Mob anymore?”, it has begun to raise an additional question: “Why does Charlie have to move from place to place each week?”

There were long-running series back in the 1960s and 1970s where the main character would “walk the Earth,” to take a line from Pulp Fiction. But in something like, say, The Fugitive, the reason for the character being on the move was established at the outset and if it was ever resolved, the show would be over. Poker Face,…

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I want to give you all a peek behind the curtain of writing these weekly reviews. Each week, I add in a heaping helping of bulleted remarks in the Stray Observations section, things I cull from my notes or my head, but the types of comments that don’t quite merit a full paragraph or more in the body of the review itself.1 Inevitably, in the self-editing process, sometimes an observation is so random that I choose to remove it. Case in point: when writing my draft of the review of last week’s episode of Poker Face, “The Taste of Human Blood,” I had initially included a few extra remarks centered around the presence of the indie filmmaker John Sayles, who portrays a friendly, avuncular, and too-willing-to-look-in-the-other-direction police chief. Though Sayles has made plenty of films, only a few have broken out widely enough that general audiences may be familiar with them. One such title is Eight Men Out.

If you haven’t seen it, Eight Men Out is an excel…

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What is the life of Charlie Cale if she is not on the run? The three-episode second-season premiere of Poker Face decided to blow up at least part of the premise of the show as established in the pilot episode. Yes, Charlie has a remarkable bullshit detector, but she doesn’t always use it in the most careful of ways, which got her in trouble with the Mafia. For now, at least, that problem no longer exists. One Mob leader died last year, and the head of the Five Families that stood in opposition to the dead man has agreed to call off a hit against our heroine. So what now?

I asked that question last week, and it feels worth wondering anew because Charlie herself, as quoted above, is basically asking herself the same thing. What are the stakes of Charlie’s life if no one’s breathing down her neck? It’s a good thing and a bad thing, depending on who you a…

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On one hand, my jaw almost dropped when I clicked on the screener for “Whack-a-Mole” and saw that the episode’s runtime was 41 minutes (including the end credits as well as a teaser for the rest of the season). But considering that “Last Looks” ends on a cliffhanger that very much involves Charlie and her run from the Mob, it tracks that the following episode would side-step the standard formula. That said, it is also true that “Whack-a-Mole” is extremely, extremely plot-heavy, which is also something Poker Face doesn’t usually rely on. Perhaps it also tracks that by the end of the episode, any sense of a broader arc is blown up in favor of just letting Charlie breeze through life without having to worry that she can’t settle down for a bit lest a Hasp goon come shooting.

Because yes, that’s the big takeaway from “Whack-a-Mole”: Charlie is no longer on the run from the Mafia. Now, I will reiterate a note I made in my first revi…

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I perked up when I saw that Natasha Lyonne directed and co-wrote “Last Looks,” the second of three episodes of Poker Face premiering this week on Peacock. She and co-writer Alice Ju last collaborated on “The Orpheus Syndrome,” which co-starred Nick Nolte and Cherry Jones, and was an absolute high point of the first season. It’s not as if I expected “Last Looks” to replicate that episode’s ultra-hangout vibes and its ode to practical special effects, but the combination of these two women behind the camera raised my interest beyond being excited to watch this show.

In part because the episode is perhaps a bit too short (“The Game is A Foot” is the longest of the three available to stream now at just 55 minutes, and…well, we’ll talk about the length of the third episode in tomorrow’s review), and in part because of how it ends, “Last Looks” is maybe a bit weaker than I would have wanted. Where “The Game Is A Foot” reminded us that Charlie Cale can only get so comfy in her current environs, “Last Looks” allows her a bit more time to stretch her metaphorical sea legs. Once she gets acclimated to the murder of the week, we learn that Charlie is in Florida and has seen neither hide nor hair of Beatrix Hasp’s men for three months. As we will learn by the conclusion, though, there’s a reason for that. For now, Charlie is happy enough, first glimpsed chatting away on the beach with some alcoholic headwear.

But as was the case in episodes like “The Orpheus Syndrome,” the death of the week in “Last Looks” hits a little harder for Charlie. Not every murder in Poker Face can befall someone who Charlie has not only met but befriended, but when that happens, her ire is raised exponentially. I should note that while this episode is not in praise of special effects, it too is a bit of a cinematic throwback. Charlie’s Barracuda is enlisted to appear in the background of a movie filming at a funeral home, whose overly officious owner, Fred Finch (Giancarlo Esposito), is pushed to murder his younger wife Greta (Katie Holmes) when she decides to leave him and head to Miami with our heroine.

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Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of the second season of Poker Face. As always, this review is free for all, with subsequent reviews exclusively for paid subscribers—Josh’s reviews of the second and third episodes released today will follow tomorrow and Saturday. For more information on our schedule for the rest of the year and what your subscription gets you, check out our About Page.

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Well, it’s been a minute, hasn’t it? It’s a fun little coincidence that both Andor and Poker Face are returning for highly anticipated second seasons on their respective streaming services after multiple years away. (Am I thrilled that each of those shows aired three episodes this week? Uh…) Certainly, we can chalk some of that up to the dual actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023, but what it means for recappers (if not all of you viewers) is a necessity to revisit the original storylines before returning to the world of the show. Poker Face, as any dedicated fan knows, is not the most mythology-heavy of TV shows; much like the 1970s-era NBC mystery procedurals that inspired this new series, specifically shows like Columbo, Poker Face is as much a show about vibes as it is a show about the death of the week and about a larger story.

That said, unlike Columbo, there is a broader arc at play in Poker Face, because the setup is different. Lt. Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department is just doing his job when he investigates a murder and drives the killers crazy by asking about just one more thing. But Charlie Cale is quite proudly not a cop, and seems almost allergic to the concept of settling down anywhere, doing anything. That’s awfully convenient, too. As “The Game is A Foot,” the first of three episodes premiering today on Peacock, begins, Charlie is still very much on the run from the Mafia.

She escaped one Mob threat last season, but ran right into a bigger one in the form of Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman), whose promise to kill Charlie sent her back in her Plymouth Barracuda to the wild blue yonder. As we once again meet Charlie, two things are obvious. First, she’s still extremely content floating adrift across the United States working in odd jobs. And second, Beatrix Hasp is not Sterling Frost, Sr., who favored a slow-burn approach of tailing Charlie in the first season. An introductory montage to Charlie makes it very clear that if Hasp’s goons could shoot straight, she’d already be dead.

Of course, we don’t meet Charlie first, because that is not how Poker Face operates. As was the case with the first season, I have to make peace with this show’s format of moving back and forth in time. As noted above and in my season-one recaps, Charlie’s not a cop, and yet we expect her to solve a murder each week. And since she’s not a Jessica Fletcher or Miss Marple type, the fact that Charlie is so often and so unexpectedly close to people who wind up dead is something that constantly must be explained. We rarely see Lt. Columbo before a body has hit the floor, but when we do, the script doesn’t have to clarify why he’s there. In Poker Face, it’s not just that we need Charlie’s presence clarified, it’s that the show rarely pushes its runtime beyond an hour a week. Thus, the investigatory aspect of the show, in which Charlie reveals her inexplicable talent for spotting bullshit as a way of accusing someone of murder, only takes up the last 20 to 30 minutes of each episode.

That can be a challenge, especially since the murders in Poker Face are intentionally intricate in their level of detail, especially in “The Game is A Foot.” When you become so invested in a show like this, it can be easy to forget that until you try to get into the weeds. For example, a couple nights ago, my wife mentioned that my 10-year old son’s school is doing a Wicked theme for its Teacher Appreciation Week. (I asked why that was the theme everyone landed on before realizing that logic didn’t enter the discussion as much as deciding what’s popular. I should be glad it’s not themed to the godawful Minecraft movie.) My son is, like his parents, a big theater geek. Thus, I felt compelled to note that if he was a few years older, he might well have enjoyed “The Game is A Foot,” seeing as, to paraphrase The Simpsons, it features four Elphabas. I also tried to briefly explain the premise of the episode (eliding some of the more adult touches) before I realized exactly how complicated things get. And that’s before Charlie shows up.

You see, once, there was a set of quadruplets, Amber, Bebe, Cece, and Delia. Their mother Norma (Jasmine Guy) pushed them to the world of acting, so they could star on a TV show called Kid Cop Nights. The show was big (especially in Indonesia, after the fact), but Norma was the worst kind of stage-mom harridan, hoarding as much of their royalties as possible. Three of the quadruplets went off to pursue their passions, be it DJing or teaching or working in an apple orchard. But Amber, the hammiest of the four young women, was stuck under her mother’s thumb. When Amber learns that her mom has changed her will right before her death, to give all her fortune to a mysterious person named Felicity Price, it’s baffling. When Amber learns that Felicity is a secret quintuplet that none of the siblings knew about, she turns to murder as the only resort.

When Charlie enters the proceedings, it’s through Delia, who works in the aforementioned apple orchard and would love to use her presumed inheritance to buy said orchard. Charlie’s simply happy to have a new friend, and to have avoided the clutches of Beatrix’s men for an extended period. But she can’t help herself when Delia arrives at Norma’s wake, meets “Felicity Price” and spots bullshit immediately. That, of course, is because only Amber met the real Felicity, a mixed-media artist working in Vermont; adopted her entire look (including a distinctive nose ring); and threw her off a nearby cliff. The punny title of this premiere gives away a bit of the “game:” Amber realizes only after killing Felicity (and filming a fake pre-suicide video for her family’s benefit) that her hidden sister has a prosthetic foot and she has to concoct a half-baked explanation for why “Amber” lost her foot in her faux-suicide. That only adds to the bullshit Charlie can identify, even if she takes a bit longer to realize why Amber is lying through her teeth.

The convoluted nature aside, “The Game is A Foot” is a solid return to form for Poker Face. The first and last moments in which we see Charlie serve as something of a bookend, reminding us that she can’t settle down even if she wants to. (You really do get the feeling that if it wasn’t for Beatrix Hasp, Charlie would be content hanging out with Delia on an apple orchard for a long time.) But that aside, the murder aspect is well handled – yes, it’s complicated, but the show effectively lays all the details out without skimping on anything. And although Amber is not a terribly sympathetic killer, you at least can understand why she would be compelled to get rid of her gleefully awful mother.

But most of all, what I liked about “The Game is A Foot” is how incredibly funny it is. Some of the humor is verbal, as in Charlie’s inability to say “sextuplets” correctly or in the family lawyer being both sympathetic and not particularly good at his job. (Casting Jin Ha, who I last saw as a…uh…key character, let’s say, in the most recent season of Only Murders in the Building, helps make this attorney seem so out of his depth.) And then there are solid visual gags, like the journalist character in Kid Cop Nights being named Scoops McGillicuddy, which is just the funniest possible name you could think of. Add to this the fact that Natasha Lyonne and Cynthia Erivo have such good chemistry together, and this is a very enjoyable opening episode. (Charlie’s dry response of “Oh no, I’m gonna lose my pension” when she decides to leave the orchard earlier than her shift allots made me laugh out loud.)

If I have any issues, it’s in what happens at the very end of this one: Charlie gets shot at again. Just as the case has been solved, and as Delia has walked away much richer than she could have imagined, Charlie is about ready to ride off with her new pal before being reminded that she’s still on the run. At what point does this added element to the mystery-of-the-week procedural become tiresome? Poker Face did some version of this in its first season, which was fine, but jumping from the frying pan into the fire is something that will only be so tolerable for a second season.

Stray observations

• If there had been an even more extended montage of Charlie working at random jobs and getting shot at, I would not have complained.

• Rian Johnson capably directed this first episode, and while much of it feels the same as last year, that shot of Amber standing near the cliff feels like Johnson and team showing off a bigger budget.

• Even though he showed up last season as an in-show murderer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does get a fun little shout-out for his time on Kid Cop Nights.

• I’m only 40, but boy, did I feel old looking at Jasmine Guy acting as someone who’s about to shuffle off this mortal coil, thinking, “…but you were in A Different World. You can’t be that old!”

• They call her Norma, but why not avoid the potential Sunset Boulevard reference and name her Rose instead, a la Gypsy?

• Let us all use this bullet as a place to hold space for Cynthia Erivo, who is very, very funny in this episode. A lot more heavy lifting on her end than Lyonne’s in this installment, and she does it with ease.

• I will note that I rewatched this episode soon after checking out Another Simple Favor with my wife, and let’s just say Cynthia Erivo is much better at playing multiple roles with distinctive personalities than Blake Lively.

• Many good one-liners here, but a stealth favorite is “Is this a riddle or an aneurysm?”

• I should’ve known that Rian Johnson, Natasha Lyonne, and company would do a riff on an episode like “Double Shock,” a superlative Columbo episode featuring the late Martin Landau as identical twins with vastly different personalities. So for my first recommendation this week, I won’t be pointing that one out, as I did so back in the first season. Instead, to tie in with “The Game is a Foot,” let’s instead showcase “Lady in Waiting,” a 1971 episode of Columbo that is fascinating not just for being directed by Norman Lloyd (best known in his later years from St. Elsewhere), nor because it features a pre-Airplane! Leslie Nielsen, but because of its dated and more-than-mildly misogynistic representation of a meek female murderer (played by Susan Clark) whose post-killing blossoming into a more powerful woman ends up being a tell to everyone around her, including Columbo himself, that something is amiss.

• If you happen to also be reading my Andor recaps, I am pleased to share that I do have screeners for this entire season. And fair is fair: as I write this, I have watched all three of the episodes premiering today (but no further). That said, we’re parceling out the other reviews, so the second episode review will drop tomorrow.

With “The Hook,” we have arrived at the end of the first, and thankfully not last, season of Poker Face. Where the series began by pointing out that Charlie Cale’s not a cop, it wraps with Charlie teasing someone else specifically for being one and having the chutzpah to try and convince her to join them. More pressing, the season concludes with Charlie facing the inevitability of perpetually being on the run, while interrogating the idea of someone choosing to walk the Earth.1 

I noted earlier in the season in the Stray Observations that it’s kind of funny how this show’s creator Rian Johnson said that Poker Face was episodic and not serialized, when its very concept bakes in some serialization. The idea of the protagonist being a human lie detector does not require serialization. But the answer to the question “Why would that protagonist be involved, even peripherally, with murders each week?” very much was a case of serialization. “The Hook” not only picks up right where “Escape from Shit Mountain” left off, with Charlie in a Denver hospital and unaware that the man who’s tracked her for over a year is right outside, waiting for her to get better. “The Hook” also wraps up the season-long arc of Charlie being on the run from the terrifying casino boss Sterling Frost, Sr. (Ron Perlman, finally in the flesh), having hopped from locale to locale each week.

What makes “The Hook” satisfying is less how it plays with the formula of past episodes—here is a murder, Charlie gets to the bottom of it, and her lie-detection skills are employed to good use—and more what it does to buck up against that very formula. I’ve talked about Columbo more than enough in past reviews, and it’s worth discussing one element of the show that Poker Face’s season-one finale explores in greater depth with its own lead: who Lt. Columbo is. The almost elemental power of Columbo is that we know so very little about the man wearing the rumpled raincoat. Does he talk a lot about an offscreen wife? Sure. Does he talk about his childhood? From time to time. Is any of it true? We have no idea.2 Hell, we never officially learn Columbo’s first name during the series.3

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Procedural shows are not built to shock. The formula of a crime procedural is such that you may be able to map out the arc of events before you start watching. If you watch Law & Order or Criminal Minds or even a medical procedural like House, you can get a good feel for the traditional beats from the established character dynamics and from the knowledge that each act of an episode could cover similar tracks but in a way that feels welcome and familiar, instead of tired and boring. Though the events of these shows are rarely comforting, the procedural serves as a perverse kind of comfort food. You know what you’re going to get.

Detective series specifically may only surprise in revealing who killed whom, or why a murder occurred. Even Columbo had its own recognizable formula that meant the propensity to shock was fairly limited. Sometimes the shock came in how Columbo pinpointed the killer in the end, but rare was the episode where a murder wasn’t committed within the first 15 minutes and the murderer’s identity made unavoidably clear. 

I say this because while “Escape from Shit Mountain” manages to hew roughly to the formula of Poker Face, it’s an immensely shocking installment in many wonderful ways. Though I’ve been slightly up and down on some of the mid-season episodes, “Escape from Shit Mountain” continues the path of creative heights that “The Orpheus Syndrome” hit last week, and doesn’t miss a beat. To say that this episode – written by showrunning siblings Nora and Lilla Zuckerman – throws some mammoth twists at the audience is an understatement. Mercifully, many of those twists hit very well, making this a standout episode.

From the start, film fans may appreciate a welcome inversion represented the episode’s director and marquee guest star, respectively series creator Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Though Gordon-Levitt has done voice cameos for Johnson in Knives Out and Glass Onion, this is the first time he’s worked onscreen with Johnson since the excellent sci-fi noir Looper1. Gordon-Levitt’s first go-round with Johnson was the indie noir Brick, wherein he portrayed a hard-nosed teenage detective trying to suss out the mysterious death of his ex-girlfriend who’d gotten involved with some bad characters. This time around, Gordon-Levitt is the nefarious fellow who killed a girl in high school, and is desperately and selfishly trying to ensure his long-time freedom as opposed to facing the hard-nosed tactics of a very unlikely detective.

For Trey Nelson, on one very long night, it’s not so easy. He’s in the middle of a 14-month sentence for insider trading, which he’s serving via swanky house arrest in a beautiful spot at the top of a very snowy mountain. He’s gotten so restless in his privileged daily routine that when his house-arrest anklet’s power goes out, he uses it as an excuse to take a joy ride in his Lamborghini…until he hits a figure in the snow, who he tries to offload in a spot underneath a tree where the skeletal remains of the snowboarding high-schooler are buried. Even though his old buddy Jimmy (David Castaneda) is forced into helping, Jimmy’s sour at Trey ignoring his old life and hometown. It’s hard to blame Jimmy, who’s been left to oversee a quaint motel on his own. Also, Trey very quickly reveals himself to be generally obnoxious. Things get worse for the contentious pair when a) the person who Trey ran over manages to extricate themselves from the tree and b) someone else rolls up in an old Plymouth wondering what’s going on.

It would be easy to assume Charlie Cale is driving the Plymouth, because it’s…y’know, her car. But the fun of “Escape from Shit Mountain” is the same fun of Poker Face as a whole: upending obvious expectations. This time around, it’s the upending of the Law of Economy of Characters. That law, conceived by the late film critic Roger Ebert, established that a character whose purpose isn’t immediately obvious must be pretty important, in essence. 

To take that a little further, I’ll note that the opening credits tell us a couple important things not established within the first 10 minutes. First, Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu is going to show up; and second, our old friend Rey Curtis–uh, sorry, Benjamin Bratt is also going to make an appearance. The latter credit is unsurprising, considering that Charlie’s whole “on the run” thing would seem likely to wrap up by next week’s finale. Why wouldn’t the show tease that conclusion at some point in this installment? That latter credit also can lead to the presumption that Charlie’s going to be fine by the end of this episode. How else can her story arc wrap up a week early? As such, you might presume (as I did) that Hsu played the person who Trey ran over, and Charlie is driving the Plymouth to the motel.

After the episode rewinds from when Trey and Jimmy see one body in front of the motel and the Plymouth pulling up, we find that Charlie was lured to stay on what she dubs Shit Mountain thanks to an almost comically hunky lumberjack with whom she indulges in a romantic relationship. But come February, the lumberjack is gone and Charlie is scrounging for tips by cleaning off icy windshields so she can get her car back on the road. Charlie befriends Hsu’s pickpocketing snowboarder, known only as “Mortimer Bernstein,” but when they get into a mild fender-bender to avoid running into a stag…well, my presumptions got reversed.

The first big shock of “Escape from Shit Mountain” comes as Morty heads back to a gas station for assistance, and Charlie is run over by Trey, who subsequently leaves her for dead in “the spot.” Charlie thus spends a good deal of the episode desperately struggling to regain her bearings and trying to extricate herself from a very dangerous situation. She’s trapped in a snowbound motel with three strangers, one of whom has a propensity for stealing her wallet, one of whom ran her over, and the last of whom is his accomplice. 

The second big shock comes near the end, when Charlie tries and fails to evade Trey entirely. All has been revealed: he killed the missing girl Chloe Jones and passed it off as a drug-related mishap, he killed Morty to avoid her running off with his Lambo and to tell the cops about his misdeeds, and he’s now killed the remorseful Jimmy, who chose to protect Charlie. So much of “Escape from Shit Mountain” is intended to throw you for a loop, and yet when Trey full-on stabbed Charlie, my jaw dropped. Even on a repeat viewing, it’s still a very gutsy move to put Charlie out of commission though salvation is soon at hand: Charlie shrewdly grabbed Trey’s house-arrest anklet, so when its power is restored, he’s found out and she can be quickly located and dispatched to a Denver hospital.

Considering this show’s various pushes into implausibility, I will forgive it the obvious question: “How the hell would Charlie survive this much pain in one night?” Instead, I willingly suspended my disbelief, aided by the expanding tension that explodes in the climax. “Escape from Shit Mountain” benefits primarily from its limited scope, as once Charlie and Morty leave the gas station, it’s just the two of them plus Trey and Jimmy for the rest of the episode, excluding a brief glimpse of local news and Bratt in the final scene. Even the back-of-the-mind knowledge that Charlie’s going to be fine, or that she has to be fine, doesn’t detract from my enjoyment. Poker Face has succeeded in no small part from establishing and then destroying expectations derived from its formula, but there’s no better example of the show creating and gleefully breaking things than this penultimate episode. What an hour of television.

Stray Observations

• Because it would be inaccurate, I will not dub this installment a bottle episode. But I will point you to Kathryn VanArendonk’s essay on the importance of getting that phrase right. 

• I don’t know how intentional it is, but the opening stretch of “Escape from Shit Mountain,” wherein we watch Trey going through his daily routine and losing interest in it over time, put me in mind of the best-ever cold open in TV history. That, of course, would be the opening to the season-two premiere of Lost. Make your own kind of music indeed. 

• Another reference that may or may not have been intentional: both Charlie and Trey have moments in the woods where they stare in silence at a majestic stag, who pauses and stares back. Maybe it’s just me, but I could not help but think of the quiet moment shared by Mr. Fox and a wolf at the end of Fantastic Mr. Fox in both of these scenes. 

• Charlie’s mind moves fast as a whip, but I did appreciate amid her initial reactions to waking up in the motel that she throws in a reference to The Shining: “I’ve always been the caretaker!”

• Not that we need a ton of proof that Trey is full of shit, but I like how he shows off – classic Harvard behavior – to correct the pronunciation of “gratis” but then tries to distract Charlie and Morty by asking who’s a certified bone-ologist.

• There’s nothing like a good dolly zoom, and the one Rian Johnson employs when Charlie takes an accidental sip of Trey’s coconut rum and flashes back to the Proustian moment of her childhood at a country club is a very good dolly zoom indeed.

• I wonder where that lumberjack went. I bet Charlie does too.

• I am probably the only person who will make this connection, but when Trey tells Jimmy, “They can’t find out about the spot, that’s why it’s called the spot,” it reminded me of this line from David Mamet’s Heist. 

• Who else among this year’s crop of Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominees should show up on Poker Face next season, after Hong Chau and Stephanie Hsu appeared this season? I wonder if Jamie Lee Curtis will have time. 

• To close out today’s review, I will once again offer up a Columbo recommendation. I do so this week with the warning that the connection will be tenuous at best, because – as noted above – this is where the standard formula of Poker Face deviates heavily from old-school shows like Columbo. But there is one early episode where the devious killer has to get rid of a less confident accomplice all while trying to smooth things over with a woman in the hopes of getting her out of the picture as well. That’s “Dead Weight” featuring Eddie Albert as a retired general whose nostalgia ends up doing him in when Columbo figures things out in the finale. A good episode, but certainly not the strongest parallel to this week’s events.

Do you ever have that feeling where you realize you’re embodying a recognizable meme? Maybe the “This is fine” dog in the burning room, or the kid who’s rocking out to some mysterious tune to the point where he’s near tears. It’s a modern sensation, naturally, but one that hit me like a ton of bricks halfway through “The Orpheus Syndrome.” This episode, set in the periphery of the world of cinematic special effects as Charlie Cale befriends an elderly FX wizard with a haunted past, aligns broadly with the formula set in stone by the Poker Face pilot. There is a murder, there is a killer, there is a twisted motive, and there is a shaggy and determined detective who unearths the truth before the end of the show. All of the pieces that are present in “The Orpheus Syndrome” are not unique to this installment.

And yet, somewhere around the extended sequence where Natasha Lyonne and Nick Nolte are just shooting the shit, talking a…

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Now that we’re seven episodes into the first (and thankfully not only) season of Poker Face, it’s worth calling out one of the most fascinating aspects of the writing and performances. Though each episode features Charlie Cale spotting and calling out bullshit, only so many installments have featured her revealing her secret skill. It happened in the series premiere, in part so creator Rian Johnson could get some vital exposition out of the way regarding Charlie’s lie-detection abilities. And it happened in “The Stall,” as Charlie pleasantly confided in a barbecue master about the talent. 

Charlie also spills the beans in “The Future of the Sport,” and to particularly effective ends. It’s notable—and I highly doubt accidental—that Charlie has only ended up telling all to a criminal of the week. I mention that because as much as the writing has to be deft: if Charlie, in one scene, reveals to a murderer that she’s a human lie detector…

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Baked into the premise of every detective show, no matter the star, is the notion that the sleuth always gets their quarry. At the very least, you can take that to mean that the sleuth figures out who did it, even if that killer gets away somehow. Shows like Columbo or Murder, She Wrote or Poker Face wouldn’t be very effective detective stories if the detectives were often missing the mark in identifying a potential killer. But I will not lie: When I (throughout the pandemic) binge-watched the exploits of Lt. Columbo or Jessica Fletcher, I fleetingly thought, “Yes, but what if they were wrong for once?” 

If you’re watching Columbo in parallel while we traverse through the first season of Poker Face, you have likely noticed that it takes the eponymous lieutenant about…oh, two minutes or so within first meeting the murderer of the week to realize they did it. He doesn’t come out and accuse them, of course. Just as Charlie Cale knows that someo…

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In my first review of Poker Face, I noted that while Lt. Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department was an excellent detective, he was not an excellent cop. In one episode, a patrolman pulls him over for a busted taillight before realizing he’s pulled over one of his own; in another episode, Columbo constantly tries to shirk a regular target-practice test because he doesn’t like firing guns. So many of the typical images we think of when we think of the police run counter to many of the great detectives, from Columbo to Sherlock Holmes to Jessica Fletcher. They’re great detectives, but they’re not really great cops. 

Of course, to some people, being a cop doesn’t mean you wear a badge or sport a pistol. Being a cop can be metaphorical as opposed to literal. You could just be overly nosy, asking questions when you shouldn’t, or you could value something above your personal beliefs. And so it goes with this week’s episode of Poker Face, “Time of the M…

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It’s rare to wish for a TV show to be longer. We are not just in the middle of Peak TV; we’re in the middle of Peak TV Length. The standard used to be that sitcoms were 22 minutes plus commercials, and dramas were 44 minutes plus commercials. HBO and other ad-free channels would air longer episodes, but not much longer than the typical half-hour or hourlong length, depending on the title and genre.

The advent of streaming has expanded episodic length beyond belief – a sitcom might run 35 minutes or 20 minutes or anywhere in between, and a drama might well be feature-length (consider the recent season of Stranger Things or the pilot episode of HBO’s The Last of Us). The irony is that the freedom of length in newer shows is often an albatross; the lack of tighter run times extends an exhausting absence of brevity to even the best shows.

So there are some things you wish for and some things you don’t. And yet, here goes: I w…

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Welcome to Episodic Medium’s weekly coverage of Poker Face, which debuts with four episodes on Peacock today—this review covers the first two episodes, while an additional review covering the third and fourth will be sent out on Saturday. As always, the first review is available to all, but subsequent reviews will only be available to paid subscribers. You can find out more on our About Page.

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“I’m not a cop. Bitch.”

Rian Johnson excels at telling detective stories that exist outside the police force. His debut film Brick transposed old-fashioned film noir tropes and dialogue in the middle of a California high school at the turn of the 21st century, as a dogged young man delved into his hometown’s seedy underground to figure out who killed his ex-girlfriend. And most recently, Johnson waded very definitively into the detective genre with his two Agatha Christie-inspired Benoit Blanc mysteries, Knives Out and Glass Onion, with a third one on the way.

Now we have Johnson’s latest project, the Peacock case-of-the-week detective series Poker Face. Starring the motormouthed and ebullient Natasha Lyonne, Poker Face very much fits into a specific subset of the offerings on Peacock. Yes, the streamer is the home of various sporting events, new-ish Universal Pictures titles, and myriad Hallmark Channel films. But Peacock is also home to a fair few old-fashioned detective series from The Rockford Files to Murder, She Wrote to the show that serves as a partial template for this one: Columbo.

Ah, Columbo. If you have not yet watched Columbo, a) you should, because it’s amazing; and b) the show’s full run is conveniently available to stream on Peacock. You can start with the two pilot films from 1968 and 1971, each of which served as long-form introductions to a rumpled detective from the Los Angeles Police Department with a rundown car, a droopy dog, a raincoat, a chomped-on cigar, and an innate tenacity to get under the skin of various and sundry murderers in Southern California. These days, Columbo is best known for two things: the incredible, Emmy-winning work from Peter Falk as the eponymous sleuth and its inventive format. 

That format is worth discussing in the context of the Poker Face premiere. As opposed to the “whodunit,” Columbo presented the “howcatchem”. There was never any mystery about who died, why they died, or who killed them. Where so many other mysteries and detective series start with the detective trying to figure out what happened, Columbo began by depicting the murder and showing us the killer, who spent the rest of the episode attempting to evade capture by the dogged sleuth, who almost always appeared after a murder as opposed to before.

From the start of the pilot episode, “Dead Man’s Hand,” Poker Face makes clear some recognizable connections to Columbo, down to the font style of the opening titles. (Columbo was one part of the “wheel” series known as The NBC Mystery Movie, so other series within that wheel, including McCloud and McMillan & Wife, had similar title designs.) Most importantly, like Columbo, “Dead Man’s Hand” starts by introducing the victim, their killer, and a clear enough explanation for why the murder occurs, all before we meet our detective, cocktail waitress Charlie Cale (Lyonne). 

Poker Face deviates from Columbo in its broader setup. Yes, this is a detective series. Yes, it’s a case-of-the-week show. But in spite of some public comments from Johnson and Lyonne, there is a key serialized aspect to Poker Face related to the events of “Dead Man’s Hand.” As the quote at the start of this review attests…well, Charlie Cale is not a cop. Now, we can talk about how Lt. Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department was not a very good cop. Columbo was an excellent detective. But he didn’t drive a cop car, he never carried a gun, and as depicted in one episode’s subplot, he doesn’t even want to fire a gun. Yet even though Columbo was arguably antithetical to the image of the police officer, he was a cop.

Charlie Cale is a gregarious, charming woman who lives on the border of Arizona and Nevada, scraping by in her work at Frost Casino and living out of a trailer. She doesn’t mind scraping by, either—she has a sunny disposition and good friends, such as casino housekeeper Natalie (Dascha Polanco). Charlie knows her way around, and she’s smart enough to eke out a living.  Of course, it also helps that Charlie Cale is a human lie detector. Yes, as it turns out, Charlie can always tell—in person or on a tinny little video screen—if someone is telling the truth or spouting bullshit (even if she doesn’t always know why they’re lying). This preternatural gift makes her a dangerous poker player – that’s why she’s conscripted into duty by casino head Sterling Frost Jr. (Adrien Brody) to spy on a private poker game spearheaded by a well-known high roller and fleece said high roller for millions.

Knowing when someone’s lying also makes Charlie dangerous when crimes are committed around her, both to the killer and to herself because…well, as she says, she’s not a cop, so she doesn’t have the protection that being a cop would lend her. In “Dead Man’s Hand,” the crime is most personal. Natalie winds up dead at the hand of Frost and his right-hand security man Cliff (Benjamin Bratt), who eliminate her because she sees something horrifying on the laptop of a well-known high roller from whom Sterling wants to rob.

Charlie knows a red flag when one is raised; even the notion—created by Cliff—that Natalie’s abusive husband killed his wife and then himself rubs her the wrong way. Not being a cop is an albatross around Charlie’s neck, even (or especially) she starts a rough investigation of her friend’s death. Revealing to Frost and Cliff that she knows what they did all but marks her for the grave.

It’s to the credit of Johnson (who wrote and directed “Dead Man’s Hand”) that the tension manages to exist hand-in-hand with the raffish humor Lyonne brings to the role of Charlie. Her laid-back mannerisms are Falkian (Falkesque?) in their own way without being a carbon copy and are disarming even amid the potential for Charlie to get killed the same way her friend did. Eventually, Charlie escapes, though not before a) Cliff shoots her and b) she witnesses Frost jump off the side of his hotel upon being found out by his terrifying offscreen father. The murders here have even larger consequences than on those 70s-era shows.

“You’re not a cop. You’re just some…woman.”

In the second episode, “The Night Shift”, Charlie’s stuck overnight in a small New Mexico town after her ‘69 Plymouth breaks down. That same night, Damian, a Subway sandwich maker artist/TikTok celebrity (Brandon Micheal Hall), is killed almost offhandedly by a very creepy young mechanic (Colton Ryan) who pins the death on Marge (Hong Chau), a quiet trucker who came to Charlie’s aid in closing up the festering gunshot wound. When Charlie hears that Marge apparently bludgeoned young Damian to death—as opposed to using her pistol—to fend him off for apparently trying to steal some off-brand medications, our heroine smells bullshit and tries to get to the bottom of the death before Cliff can hunt her down. 

Generally speaking, these two episodes—both of which are directed by Johnson—are sturdy, well-made pieces of television that hearken back to the 70s style of filmmaking, with long and patient shots, rapid zooms, and pacing that lets character dynamics breathe without lagging. And some of how Poker Face turns the notion of a show like Columbo on its head—such as the fact that Charlie can’t protect herself behind a badge, and can barely muster up the energy to lie that she’s a cop to see some security footage—raise the stakes for the charismatic lead character. 

But there are aspects of Poker Face that make me somewhat hesitant, at least so far. (As I write these words, the first six of ten episodes are available to critics, but I’ve watched only these two.) Considering how Knives Out and Glass Onion (which, for reference, I adore almost equally) play around with chronology, it should not come as a shock that Poker Face does the same. While Columbo began each episode by depicting a murder and how the killer tries to shift suspicion off themselves, the rest of the story would follow sequentially. 

In Poker Face, it’s not just that we witness the murder first and learn why the killer does what they do. It’s that when we meet Charlie in each episode, we’re meeting her before the murder has occurred, with the scripts rewinding to establish where Charlie is when the crime is committed. In “The Night Shift,” withholding Charlie’s whereabouts for almost 20 minutes raises the tension as we’re wondering what happened to her post-gunshot. But it also means that the crime-solving part of the show takes up less overall time. “The Night Shift” clocks in at 62 minutes, and Charlie gets wind of Damian’s death 28 minutes in, largely because of how much time it takes for us to figure out how she plays into the murder and Marge having been framed. 

On one hand, I get the rewinding-with-time aspect: Charlie’s not a cop, so it’s not like we should expect her to wander onto the scene only after a murder is committed. If she’s not already there when the dirty deed goes down, her arrival may seem too timely.

But the flip side is that there’s in medias res storytelling going on, and I’m not going to lie to you folks: I’m not a fan of in medias res storytelling in general. (With Knives Out and Glass Onion, at least, the back-and-forth chronologies do not mirror each other exactly. Here, the show appears to be establishing its own formula to be repeated in each installment.) I don’t know how necessary it is in this show’s case, either. If the narrative flowed in chronological order, there may be less tension, for example, in figuring out how Charlie is doing post-gunshot wound (or, in the case of the opening episode, how she and Natalie are connected), but it would allow for more time to let Charlie flex her sleuthing abilities. 

Considering Rian Johnson’s other work, the timey-wimey aspect is not altogether shocking. At one moment in “Dead Man’s Hand,” Charlie is watching Pulp Fiction on her cell phone, specifically the scene at the film’s end where Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield are eating in a diner, talking about life in general. It is likely no accident that one bit of dialogue we hear is Jules saying he’s going to “walk the Earth. You know, like Caine in Kung Fu.” Charlie Cale is going to have to solve a handful of murders beyond the ones in the first two episodes of Poker Face, but she’s not going to stay in one place for very long.

One thing is exceedingly obvious from these installments: Natasha Lyonne is an absolute delight as Charlie Cale. She’s a shambling figure of a detective, as Columbo-like as she’s similar to The Dude in The Big Lebowski or Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s 1973 film The Long Goodbye. Lyonne’s as funny in big showdowns as in offhand comments, such as a shocked reaction at being woken up on a picnic table by a literal buzzard. And the deadpan reactions from many of the people surrounding her are equally funny and unexpected. (I particularly enjoyed how a young convenience-store employee, upon Charlie explaining her ability to spot a lie, says, “It’s OK, I don’t care.”)

As Poker Face proceeds through its first season, I’m hoping that some of the less serialized elements get stronger, especially considering the massive list of one-and-done guest actors. Even though I’m dubious regarding a couple aspects, the show’s starting out in an intriguing fashion. Hopefully, with Johnson passing the buck to some other writers and directors, the show’s shape will smooth out.

Stray Observations

• Peacock is releasing the first four episodes of Poker Face today—as noted above, another review is on the way to cover the other two opening installments on Saturday. Two and two, as Chuck Woolery would say.

• It’s no accident that the Pulp Fiction clip briefly glimpsed in the pilot reflects how Quentin Tarantino plays with time—the scene is both the film’s finale and ties into the opening, which sets up a potential diner robbery that Vincent and Jules evade. 

• It’s been a while since I watched Orange is the New Black, so it took me until a Wikipedia search to remind myself that I recognized Dascha Polanco from that series as well as from co-starring in the film version of In the Heights.

• If my ears do not deceive me, the gravelly tones of Sterling Frost, Sr. are provided by Hellboy himself, Ron Perlman, who I imagine we’ll see at some point in the flesh.

• The smash-cut from Sterling and Charlie shaking on the deal to take down the morally repulsive whale to the word “SLAIN” in the headline regarding Natalie’s death is impressive, and immediately topped by the shot of Charlie’s wide eyes, the online story reflected in her teary gaze. This Rian Johnson fellow might have a future in directing!

• I choose to believe that Noah Segan’s local sheriff is the same as the Harlan Thrombey-loving detective he portrayed in Knives Out, and you cannot convince me otherwise.

• I hope we get to see Charlie drink coffee again because super-fast Natasha Lyonne is very funny indeed.

• A good chunk of pop-culture references in these two episodes, but my favorite has to be Cliff comparing Charlie to Michael Westen from Burn Notice. Peacock, like the USA of old, must truly believe characters are welcome.

• Among the cast in “The Night Shift,” there’s John Ratzenberger as Cliff Clav–er, sorry, as Abe, the “last honest mechanic in New Mexico”, and Colton Ryan as the very obviously weird mechanic Jed. If you are like me, you may remember Colton Ryan from the film version of Dear Evan Hansen, and if you are like me, you may wish to forget you ever saw the film version of Dear Evan Hansen.

• The standout scene in “The Night Shift” is the conversation between Damian and Jed, climaxing in Damian’s death. The lengthy scene unfolds with enough tension that, the first time through, I was genuinely unsure who was going to die.

• Oh, just one more thing. (Sorry/not sorry.) While Poker Face only has some recognizable similarities to Columbo, I will use each week’s review to recommend an episode of Columbo that has some tonal connections.

  • To go along with “Dead Man’s Hand,” I’m recommending “A Friend in Deed”. It’s Columbo’s final third-season episode and the first in which Columbo is forced to investigate his own department – specifically the LAPD Deputy Commissioner. In terms of having two killers and the notion of the murder being committed to hide another crime, “A Friend in Deed” fits quite well.

  • To tie into “The Night Shift,” I’ll recommend “Old Fashioned Murder,” a season-six episode. The primary connection here is the old-fashioned frame job. In the episode, set in an antiquities museum, Ruth (Joyce Van Patten) frames her niece for a pair of murders after attempting to send Columbo down a rabbit hole involving a faked robbery.