The best thing about Poker Face is that it doesn’t bother trying to shore up what it knows is a flimsy premise. Fans of the first season will recall that Charlie Cale, Natasha Lyonne’s wisecracking 70s detective homage, has an in-built ability to detect a lie as soon as someone tells it. Instead of trying to explain this gift away as the result of a gamma storm or spider bite or covert government experiment, it now accepts that, yeah, she has a “freaky little lie detector trick”, that’s the extent of the idea, got a problem with that? These days, Charlie waves away any queries about it with an “Eh”, a shrug and a cheeky nudge of the baseball cap and aviator shades.
After using her talent to work her way through a series of increasingly preposterous case-of-the-week murders last time, then ending up with the mafia putting out a hit on her, Charlie begins the second season (starting 8 May, 9pm, Sky Max) on the lam once more, only now goons with guns keep popping up and shooting at her. For what could have been a high-concept show, Poker Face is surprisingly fuss-free about all of this, and barely lets a violent mob-based subplot get in the way of what Charlie does best. That is, wandering around small-town America, working out who is a killer and how/why they did it, then exposing them for their terrible crimes. She has to dodge bullets on occasion, sure, but she always keeps her eyes on the prize: coughing out the word “bullshit” and cracking the case.
