The new show is Knives Out Columbo Meets Natasha Lyonne.

Despite the new Mysterious Peacock series poker face Taking place in the present day, the opening credits appear in mustard-yellow capitalized typeface pasting the beginning of a 1970s network television show, going so far as to include the title of each episode in quotes and the year of release in Roman numerals. Showrunner Rian Johnson has said that the show’s “howcatchem” structure, in which the killer’s identity is known from the start and the plot comes from seeing how a gumshoe cracks the case, is indebted to the crime procedural he grew up watching, such as murder-of-the-week stories. Colombo. Given this influence, casting Natasha Lyonne as the heroine of the crime series was only natural. Leon’s raspy voice and sinister energy have often been compared to the trench-coat-clad private-eye demeanor of Peter Faulk, and the actress herself has Falk has been cited as a personal acting hero. Like Falk, Leon has a knack for appearing at once distracted and sharply observed. And like him, she’s now the charismatic presenter of a quick-witted kill-of-the-week program who can explode irresistibly like a bag of malted milk balls.

In the first season of Russian doll, the two-season series, which Lyonne co-created and starred in for Netflix, the mystery her character set out to solve was both metaphysical and autobiographical in nature: what she could learn from her past that might help her escape the time loop that had been convincing her to live the same life. Killer Christmas over and over again? In the show’s second season, after resolving this dilemma, Nadia Lyonne finds herself revisiting parts of her mentally ill mother’s life to understand the events surrounding her birth. By contrast is Charlie Cale, the abnormally gifted tramp who is the heroine poker faceEvery week, she sets out to solve a different mystery that has absolutely nothing to do with her psychological background. In fact, six episodes in (the full season is 10, but only the first six have been shared with critics), and the viewer still knows what you don’t know about where Charlie came from or how she came to have the unique talent that makes her a master. Amateur Detective: The ability to sense when anyone is telling a lie, not through psychic powers but simply through what appears to be an innate gift for reading people’s faces and voices to have the gift of “tell.” It’s a testament to the new series’ confidence in its far-fetched premise that, by the end of the pilot, this semi-magical trait seems as natural and unalterable as part of Charlie’s personality as her pointy black boots, sky blue 1969 Plymouth Barracuda, and her tiny mop of dirty blonde curls. .

In the first episode, written and directed by Johnson, Charlie is working as a cocktail waitress at a Las Vegas casino when her fellow employee and close friend (Orange is the new blackDascha Polanco) was murdered in what appears to be a domestic violence case. But Charlie, noticing that the newly installed casino boss (Adrien Brody) and his henchman (Benjamin Bratt) are lying about some details of the incident, sets out to investigate on her own. As it turns out, the casino management is aware of Charlie’s past as a poker hustler (when you’re playing a game that involves bluffing, having a built-in polygraph is an invaluable tool). Unaware that they are on her radar as potential killers, they blackmail her into helping them catch a casino high roller involved in dirty deeds.

After Charlie leaves town at the end of the first episode, fearing for her personal safety, the grim-faced casino mogul goes off in hot pursuit – then mostly disappears from view, replaced by a rotating cast of actors. Not The guest stars are grim-faced. In a formula that once ruled prime-time television but now reads archaic, a cast of recognizable faces—Chloe Sevigny, Lil’ Real Hory, Nick Nolte, Ellen Barkin, Tim Meadows, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt—fly through the show from week to week as Charlie, who works odd jobs and lives out of her car, from town to town. (The show also features some lesser-known faces that might delight die-hard fans, like longtime Rian Johnson collaborator Noah Seguin, who has appeared in both of Johnson’s films, and novelist and John Darnielle, Mountain Goats singer-songwriter, lives at last A lifelong dream of being metal kings.) in the specifies element poker face Aside from most crime-solving shows, our heroine does not arrive at a crime scene after it has been committed. Instead, she is already acquainted with all the major players from whatever menial job she has taken up in her new place of residence. Sometimes, like in the episode that commissioned Sevigny as a washed-up rock singer, Charlie befriends a future crime victim. In others, as in a particularly clever segment featuring Judith Light and Ebata Merkerson as former left-wing extremists now living in a nursing home, she befriends the killers. Each case so far has shared a chronological turn with Johnson’s two whore movies, Take out the knives And glass onionin which frequent flashbacks provide a new perspective on the incident under investigation.

The smoldering vanity that there could be violent murder in every town Charlie visits is part of the audience’s initial acceptance, just as mine is. She wrote the murder— another show Johnson claimed was an influence — he had to accept the notion that the small mystery-writing heroine town in Maine was one of the murder capitals of the world. In two episodes, the path of clues that Charlie follows to solve the case is laid out so clearly, that the audience gets there before she does.

While he’s becoming increasingly skeptical of popular culture’s portrayal of the police, Charlie is a detective we can look up to without worrying about indulging in “copaganda.”

But in essence poker face Not a brain teasing series about a super detective. It’s a break show based on the fun Natasha Lyonne Company, which is great even in poor installments. Not unlike Benoit Blanc who plays Daniel Craig in Take out the knives Charlie Cale is an engaging departure from the grim antihero that has become a standard in crime TV shows over the past few decades. Apart from adding more fun to the show, this little characterization also has a political dimension. At a time when he’s becoming increasingly skeptical of popular culture’s portrayal of the police, Charlie is a detective we can look up to without worrying about getting sucked into “copaganda. (In an early episode, she initially plans to send a piece of gun-smoking evidence to the local police, before thinking better and adding another string of unspoiled recipients) But the fact that she’s such a sweet amateur—a curious person who is simply drawn to the social dynamics— For every new town you visit – Charlie also reports: future sinners tend to open up to it, often revealing themselves more than they should, just because they enjoy being around it.If you miss the kind of episodic storytelling that is more concerned with delivering a one-hour package of entertainment than keeping the viewer entertained In suspense until the next part, you’ll probably enjoy being around it, also.