Review: Poker Face, "Exit Stage Death" | Season 1, Episode 6
In which Charlie enters the world of the (dinner) theater.
“Theater people are so strong.”
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…