Have you ever wondered, and if not, why not, what a reboot of Murder, She Wrote would be like if Jessica Fletcher (played by the delightfully talented and now sadly departed Angela Lansbury) was a minimum-wage worker (and sometimes not even that), on the run from organised crime casino-owning thugs, who has the uncanny ability to telling if someone was lying and who spends her days righting wrongs, often to her own detriment (though always a satisfied sense of justice)?
Well, wonder no more avid watchers of streaming content because Natasha Lyonne, who has wowed us in countless shows but most recently in Russian Doll, has shown exactly what this would look like and it is very good indeed.
So good in fact that Poker Face, a seamless meld of episodic howcatchem murder case of the week – this is a form of murder mystery fiction where you see the crime and the perpetrator right at the start with the rest of the story devoted to how the detective, such as Columbo, reveals the guilty party – and person-on- the-run storytelling arc all but impels you to once again laud Rian Johnson, creator of Knives Out and Glass Onion: A Knives out Mystery, for doing a brilliantly inspired job of reinventing the crime genre.
Even better, he has done it by taking some well-worn tropes and clichés – the world-weary protagonist with a heart of gold, the Columbo murder mystery model, the almost Scooby Doo-like reveals where the bad guy or gal gets their well-deserved comeuppance to name just three – and absolutely, sensationally and breathtakingly reimagining them in such a way that you feel like this is the first time you’re really watching a murder mystery.
Not only has he accomplished this impressive reshaping of a genre in such a way that it looks near effortless but he has infused Poker Face with so much raw, affecting humanity, driven by Lyonne’s Charlie Cale who often sacrifices her own self interest, which is staying ahead of the mob naturally, in order to see justice done.
All that humanity might look a little earnest and sugary were it not for a grounded earthiness that Lyonne brings to the character who wants to stay alive and out of harm’s way thank you very much but who is actually a decent person at heart and who knows that she can’t walk away from justice being served.
It’s that fundamental building block of her character that gets her into trouble in the first place in Vegas, and which continues to mean that Poker Face is less a weekly solve-the-case, though it is wondrously and enjoyably that, and more an exploration of how it is possible to be beleaguered and put upon by people and society and yet still retain an impelling need to do the right thing.
So at it’s heart it’s a story of humanity, of dreams won and lost and how far people will go to keep a hold of that elusive brass ring we all crave to one extent or another.
If there is a linking theme throughout the five episodes consumed so far, besides the obvious fugitive who has done no wrong angle, it’s that every single one of the people who have killed someone, and many of their victims besides, are all victims of the once-glittering American Dream.
Leaving aside the fact that, like most, if not all national mythologies, the American Dream was likely always more spin than reality, especially if you weren’t white and wealthy, it’s now a tired shred of its former self, the top % holding over 50% of the nation’s wealth and leaving the episodic guests such as Chloë Sevigny as a has-been metal rocker who might just kill for the right royalty-earning song and Judith Light as Irene and S. Epatha Merkerson as Joyce, two retirement home inmates who have found their violent way to comment on the inequities of US society, clawing for their share of an ever-diminishing pie.
It doesn’t diminish for a second the harmful gravity of what these people do to even the odds, their murderous sins compounded by the fact that many of the murder victims are fellow residents of the shit train of inequity on which pretty much all these characters unwillingly ride, but it does explain how seemingly ordinary people can do such cruelly extraordinary things.
While Poker Face doesn’t explicitly set out to deliver stinging social commentary, focused much of the time on the fascinating vagaries of broken humanity and how it’s possible to justify terrible things for your own benefit, it does end up doing just that, revealing how hellish life can be for people way out on the dispossessed margins.
The interesting thing is that for all the people who resort to murder to advance their interests – they don’t, of course, well, ultimately at least, with Charlie comprehensively seeing to that with some inventive and often amusing means of bringing them to justice – there are people like our plucky and resigned protagonist, who’s barely scraping herself, physically and financially, who are willing to sit down the better angels of human nature and forgo immediate self-interest for something greater than themselves.
People like Charlie and the host of people we get to know in the artfully and empathetically character studies that begin each episode – again, Poker Face is as much revelatory urban anthropology as it is crime solving drama – don’t take the easy, bloody option, and don’t always prioritise brutal expediency over looking for someone else.
With that kind of social and emotional depth, and an eye on sharp, fully-fleshed out characterisation and incisively blistering commentary on humanity good and bad, and a witty sense of humour that stands the series in good stead in its unavoidably darker moments, all raspily observed by Charlie who invariably knows bullshit when she sees it and isn’t afraid to call it out, Poker Face is a thrillingly good reinvention of the crime genre that gleefully and thoughtfully exploits the thousand blindspots that make up collective humanity and which fuel a show that knows there’s a lot of self-serving darkness in the world but also some flaring-up of good from the most unlikely of places and people.