TV Review: "Poker Face" (S2, Eps 1-3)
Natasha Lyonne shines again in this delightful, funny, quirky, and sometimes deeply tragic mystery series.
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Warning: Spoilers for the series follow.
I’ve been a big fan of Poker Face ever since the show premiered all the way back in 2023. Natasha Lyonne is pitch -perfect as Charlie Cale, who is the very definition of quirk. Not only does she have a deliciously husky voice and frizzy red hair and a New York accent so thick that it’s almost (and often is) caricature; she also has the bizarre ability to detect when anyone’s lying. Hearing her exclaim the word “bullshit,” sometimes under her breath and sometimes aloud, while someone is talking will never not be a delight.
Now, after two long years of waiting, Charlie is back, and the show that she headlines is better than ever. Because the series is just so much fun and because each episode is just so layered and rich and complex--in terms of both storytelling and Charlie’s development as a character–we’re going to take them in installments, beginning with the first three of the new season.
Of the first three episodes, there’s no doubt that the very first, the humorously titled “The Game is a Foot,” is the strongest. I mean, how could it not be, when it stars the great Cynthia Erivo as a set of quintuplets. Four of them–Amber, Bebe, Cece, and Delia–starred on a hit cop series, while the fifth, Felicity, was raised by their father and has no knowledge of the others. Of the five, Amber is the most bitter, since she is the one who stayed to take care of their mother, only to find out that the spiteful and covetous old woman left her fortune, which she built on the backs of her daughters, to an unknown fifth one. Small wonder that this pushes the beleaguered Amber over the edge, leading her to murder the previously unknown sister and try to take her identity. Hijinks–including an extended bit about a missing leg–ensue.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Erivo is nothing short of amazing in this episode. It’s not every actress who could convincingly capture the complexities and nuances and quirks of five different identical people, yet that's exactly what she does. It’s clear that she is having the time of her life, and she helps the episode to really sing (pun intended). And, as with any murder mystery, one can’t help but sympathize with Amber a bit, given how much she has sublimated her own desires and ambitions to her mother’s tyranny, only to be stripped of even the chance to inherit any of the money that she helped to earn. Less justifiable, of course, is her decision to both murder her sister and try to keep the money from the others.
The second two are strong in different ways. The second episode, “Last Looks,” features yet another villainous turn by Giancarlo Esposito, who really does seem to have carved out a niche playing sinister and suave villains. In this case, he plays a funeral home director, Fred Finch, who murders his wife, cremates her, and hides his crime by utilizing the film set currently using his funeral parlor for filming. Even more macabrely, he ends up putting said wife’s remains into a record (as in, a piece of vinyl that he then plays on a record player). It’s all very delightful and strange, and it’s always a pleasure to see Esposito playing a dour but dapper villain, just as it’s also fun to see him almost get blown up in a scene that is eerily evocative of the explosion that took the life of his most iconic character, Gus Fring.
There’s also much to love about the third episode, “Whack-A-Mole,” beginning with the fact that it features the one and only Rhea Perlman, who appears as Beatrix Hasp, the sinister crime lord who’s had it out for Charlie. Now, at last, she catches up to this little agent of chaos, and watching these two actresses–each of whom are known, in their own ways, for playing tough-as-nails characters–is one of the best things about this entire episode. I mean, any episode of television that features Perlman is going to be worth watching, but when she appears in a show that is as well-constructed as Poker Face, the results are spectacular.
Just as successful, though, is John Mulaney’s appearance as the dirty FBI agent Daniel Clyde-Otis, who has been secretly working with Hasp all along, and I love getting to see Mulaney play a real sleaze (and a coward). Richard Kind also is his usual hilarious self as Jeffrey, Hasp’s husband, a mild-mannered man who just wants to escape this life and live happily-ever-after with Beatrix. The tragedy of it all is that he ends up getting killed in an operation gone wrong. As always in Poker Face, the humor is often laced with a note of sadness. If there’s one bright side, it’s that with Beatrix now having exposed corruption within the FBI she gets her freedom, and Charlie no longer has to flee for her life.
It’s not every show that would take the opportunity to do a bit of a reset so early in the season, but Poker Face is not every show. By freeing Charlie from the constraints of being constantly pursued by those who want to kill her, the show opens up a whole new set of possibilities and new stories to be told. While it’s doubtful that Charlie will ever really settle down, at least now she can devote more time to finding herself and figuring out what she wants to do with the rest of her life.
With its second season, Poker Face has really hit its stride. Each episode feels as if it has been finely crafted, and everything about them, from the perfectly executed stories to the performances. In lesser creative hands the show would start to feel formulaic. As it is, it manages to feel fresh and comforting at the same time (even if that’s a bit of an odd thing to say about a show about murder).
At the end of the day, though, this is Natasha Lyonne’s show, and she repeatedly shows why she is the perfect person for this role and why Charlie is the hero that we need. Charlie might be a bit of a migrant, and she might have made some questionable choices in the past, but she’s still a woman with a conscience and a strong moral compass. Like the other amateur sleuths that have achieved iconic status–Jessica Fletcher, Columbo, and so many others–Charlie is someone that the audience can believe in, someone whose view of the world is guided by a strong sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.
Given the dark and lawless world in which we find ourselves, that’s very refreshing, indeed.