Peacock’s Poker Face Episode 1 has me hooked and desperate for more in Rian Johnson’s answer to the episodic mystery.
I admit I like procedures. I’ve seen everything from Matlock to Murder She wrote and much more before that. I love the formula, and the taste of the week design means I could pop in and out of the series without ever worrying about episode order or skipping a few, since those shows were on their way before coming from DVRs, clouds or view on demand. It was the Middle Ages when you either caught it in real time or had bad luck. The horror! Both weekly and multi-episode procedures were rare because the climate could not sustain them. Modern procedurals like True Detectives redefined what kind of stories these shows could tell.
Peacock’s Poker Face premiering today from Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Glass Onion) is a wedding of the best of both types of proceedings. It combines one-off crime stories with a seasonal thriller that is as compelling as the main character. Natasha Lyonne (Russian doll) is magnetic. Her hoarse voice, ironic mockery, big eyes and wild hair are iconic. They, along with clever scripts written by Rian Johnson and his brilliant writers, including Lyonne himself, are money.
Poker Face Episode 1 opens at Frost Casino. It sets up the rules and players for the rest of the season without an unpleasant explanatory dump or confusing downtime. Always beautiful, Benjamin Bratt is a mid-level manager and fixer, but the hotel and casino is not as beautiful as him. It’s the kind of place where hope and your bank account die. A maid finds something strange on the laptop of the high roller staying in the presidential suite. She takes a quick photo and gets out of there, narrowly escaping discovery.
When the maid shows up Cliff (Bratt), he immediately calls the manager, Sterling Frost, Jr., hilariously smarmy and intensely unlikeable Adrian Brody, who pretends to listen and promptly sends her to her death. Instead of contacting the authorities, he let go of Cliff, who went to her house and shot her abusive husband and then her. Cliff then staged the scene to make it look like a murder-suicide. At this point, everything rewinds a bit and Lyonne’s Charlie Cale is introduced.
It’s a structure that takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of what you’re looking at, you’ll be sucked into Charlie’s world of unhappy beer drinking, protective advice and spotting nonsense. Then, in a twist, the mystery formula is turned on its head. Poker Face Episode 1 isn’t so much about who did it as what did someone do and why? Charlie and the deceased woman were friends, and after her death, Charlie starts looking for answers because she can’t let go. Of course, as it turns out, Charlie can’t let anything go when innocent people are involved, but that comes later.
Unfortunately, while all this is happening, Frost tries to take advantage of Charlie’s unique talents. It seems that years ago she was hired as a bartender by his father, who caught her using her talent to clean up a slew of poker games across the country, including one of his. Instead of killing her, he offers her a job. She can work as a cocktail waitress at the casino in exchange for her life. However, she can never play poker again. Frost senior has been blackmailing her from coast to coast, so with no other plans, she settled in a ramshackle caravan outside of town and started swinging drinks.
She does not intend Frost, Jr. The man in the presidential suite is playing in a private game instead of the casino, and that’s a big deal for Frost, Jr., who has big daddy issues and something to prove. The plan is to use Charlie to read the game through cameras set up in the room and clean everyone up. She gets a share of the money and a new life, and he gets to prove to his father that he’s a smart businessman. It’s an ill-advised plan at best, but when this storyline and her friends’ deaths catch up, Charlie can’t help but become a fly in Frost’s ointment.
At first, Charlie thinks her friend was killed by her husband. The man was a ticking time bomb of male aggression. In the days leading up to her death, she had a black eye and stayed with Charlie for safety. The drunken and belligerent turd even showed up at the casino, creating a huge scene before being relieved of his weapon thanks to Charlie’s observational skills and escorted off the premises.
Charlie’s net worth is tricky. She is not psychic or omniscient. She just knows if you’re lying, but not why. As she tells Frost, everyone lies about the smallest things all the time. The trick is in the why of it all. Everyone has an angle. Some try to take advantage of others, while a few sincerely want to be left alone or help someone they care about. Everyone has secrets. You need to know their motivation to understand what’s important. In addition to her effective BS meter, she is indomitably determined. She’s a dog with a bone that won’t let go no matter how much danger it brings her.
She begins to investigate her boyfriend’s death when she finds things that make no sense about the murder. Her boyfriend’s husband was left-handed, but the gun was found in his right hand. It defies reason, but the police don’t care. Later, Brody tells her they are on his payroll and told them to ignore any conflicting evidence. Frost also tries to lead her back to the Grift, but it’s too late. The mystery has her and she continues to investigate. She searches her friend’s house and finds her iPad, which she manages to unlock by asking a colleague for her locker combination.
At first there is nothing, but then she finds the deleted photos and sees the photo from the high roller’s room. She immediately takes it to Frost, who again tries to redirect her to the deck. He tells her that they will take the man’s money first and then report him to the authorities. At that time, she remembers details about her boyfriend and her husband that contradict the news report of her death. The reporter says that Natalie asked the casino to release her husband, which is why they let him go. She then watches surveillance footage from the day Jerry was kicked out and saw him leave through a metal detector. This prompts her to realize that he couldn’t have had the gun to shoot Natalie because the casino still had it.
She accuses Cliff and Sterling of murder and they check her phone to make sure she’s not answering anything. When they discovered she wasn’t, they reminded her that no one would believe or care about her. Frost controls the police and the city; she can help them with the game and run with the money or die. However, Charlie is more intelligent than they think, telling them that she wasn’t recording at the time, but rather when they walked her through their plan. Frost still thinks he’s in control because he owns the police, but she tells him she didn’t send the earlier recording to the police. Instead, she sent it to the high roller. They thought he had gone out to dinner so they could set up the cameras, but instead he had left town.
Knowing he was done, Frost receives a call from his father, who now knows what he was up to, and jumps off his balcony to his death. Charlie runs off and is shot by Cliff, but manages to escape. Frost Sr. calls her and tells her he is coming for her. He let her live once, but not again. She emails Natalie’s photos and her recording to the FBI and sheriff, destroys her phone, and drives out of town.
Poker Face Episode 1 was a tight and effective pilot that built up the strangely sentimental and fascinating world Charlie finds himself in. She is a captivating creature who plays Lyonne with innocence, grit and whimsy. She’s a hero to root for in a world full of people to root against. The first four episodes were released today, with new episodes premiering weekly. Find all our Poker Face coverage here.
As editor-in-chief of Signal Horizon, I enjoy watching and writing about genre entertainment. I grew up on old fashioned slashers, but my real passion is television and all weird and ambiguous stuff. My work can be found here and Travel Weird, where I am the editor-in-chief.
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