You wait years for a pulpy TV series about a female sort-of private investigator who drives a classic car around the more sun-bleached parts of the United States, then Natasha Lyonne and Patricia Arquette put on their statement sunglasses in the very same year. Poker Face and High Desert have emerged as two of the more original series to debut in 2023, and both share a similarly noir-ish spirit – though their protagonists run with that in very different directions.
High Desert is the messier of the two mysteries. Arquette plays Peggy Newman, a formerly successful drug dealer whose business empire was busted by the FBI a decade ago. She is now a recovering addict working at a wild west theme park in Yucca Valley, California. Despite the freewheeling chaos that dogs her life, Peggy is “the asshole whisperer”, with a nose for detail and a keen eye for a con artist. Through a series of unlikely events, including a breast enhancement operation, workplace theft and a hallucinatory conversation with a cactus flower, Peggy ends up on the tail of a man who calls himself “Guru Bob” (Rupert Friend, proving himself to be a standup slapstick artist), who may be even more of a fraud than he first appears to be.
