In Poker Face, a new mystery series on the Peacock streaming service, Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a frazzled, good-natured weirdo who bums across the American landscape, chased by a vengeful casino owner's lackey, solving murders with her uncanny ability to flawlessly detect when someone is intentionally lying.
The series was created by Rian Johnson, who also wrote and directed the Knives Out films, both of which were satires of pathetic, ultimately worthless rich people. Poker Face similarly pays tribute to well-worn mystery tropes—in this case borrowing heavily from old-school TV detectives like Columbo—while giving the genre a contemporary, implicitly left-leaning twist.
