The Poker Face Of Modern TV Justice
Natasha Lyonne and Rian Johnson’s new series entertainingly reinvents some classic tropes
American TV has a long history of series based on a traveller who, often inadvertently, finds themselves bringing justice to a place and then moving on down the road to somewhere else, searching for a resolution to their own quest. He might arrive on horseback in a Western, he might be fleeing the law and seeking to prove his innocence, like The Fugitive, or he might be suffering from a cursed power he needs to escape from, like The Incredible Hulk.
Or she might arrive in a ’69 Plymouth Barracuda, running from a casino boss who blames her for the death of his son, with the ability to spot (“bullshit!”) when someone’s telling a lie. That’s the life of Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale in Poker Face, roaming America and trying to stay off the grid while stumbling into murders that she’s uniquely placed both to notice and then to solve.
Of course, Poker Face most direct comparison is Columbo becauseof their structural similarities. Each episode starts by showing us the murder-of-the-week taking place, so there’s no mystery about who committed it and how. The mystery here is not “whodunit?” but “howcatchem?” though Charlie has a somewhat different role in the story to the one Peter Falk’s…
