Poker Face: Season 2

Around the same time that Rian Johnson managed to get back on track with Knives Out after a polarising Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi, the filmmaker also created an additional whodunnit project that existed in a more anthological format, with Natasha Lyonne's quirky Charlie Cale being the connective tissue that brought each episode together. This project was known as Poker Face, and following a well-received first season, a second round of episodes was soon greenlit, which would continue the overarching narrative thread while seeing Charlie also solving and unravelling several completely separate murders across the United States.

This next batch of episodes is now here, and without foreshadowing or jumping the gun, after watching them I'm quite happy with what the different directors and writers have put together this time. If you've seen the first season of Poker Face, it's similar in structure. However, as Charlie is now on the run following the events of the first season, she's not rooted to one location and instead finds herself in differing parts of the country, meeting all manner of strange people in unorthodox situations, where she utilises her signature lie-detecting skills to root our their sins. This could be simply uncovering lying siblings or shining a spotlight on a con artist, or something far weirder like proving the innocence of a mistreated alligator or getting involved with the childish dynamics at a fancy boarding school.

This season of Poker Face does a great job at keeping you as the viewer on your toes and ensuring that you never really know what will happen next in Charlie's tale. The great cameo appearances from well-known stars massively help with this, with individuals like Cynthia Erivo standing out for her role as not one but four identical sisters, or Giancarlo Esposito proving to be an effective and twisted funeral director too. Some of the other cameos are less memorable and this more succinct nature does also apply to some of the episodes in general, which struggle in comparison to others. But the one consistent factor from start to finish is still Lyonne, who effortlessly handles the role of Charlie, delivering a charismatic and energetic performance where she is pretty much always the shining star of this season.

On the contrary, I do think that Poker Face could do with reigning itself in at times. It's always had a bizarre whodunnit structure where the mystery is often solved towards the start of the episode, before then switching to Charlie's perspective and seeing how she can trap and overcome the culprit. That to me is fine for a period but as each episode goes on, you start to hope that the show will tweak or change its formula just once to catch you off guard, instead of simply relying on its unusual cast and scenarios to do this job. And this leads me to one of my biggest problems with this season of Poker Face, which is that some of the episodes are so ridiculous and stupid that you can lose a bit of interest in them. The episode about the Florida Man cop who gets eaten by his coked up alligator is a particular abuser of this, but there are other examples, like the baseball episode that seems like a massive stretch of a "whodunnit" from start to finish.

Plus, while there is a core narrative thread that ties this season of Poker Face together, it lacks the underlying gangster story that coined Season 1, where Adrien Brody's Sterling Frost had frequent references, while other characters continued to hunt Charlie down. This second season starts with moments like this, but after only a few episodes this progressive nature is concluded leaving each episode to be more anthological than it ever has been. Sometimes this works, but typically only when the plot and mystery is strong in the first place, which isn't the case for every episode.

But none of this changes the fact that Poker Face is a delightfully filmed, produced, and acted series. It's truly entertaining, light-hearted, witty, and fun, and there's definite legs in this format that can carry it into the future. It just needs a more primary premise to tie each episode together and perhaps also the occasional risk taken in plot structuring so that every episode doesn't feel too familiar after watching just the opening five minutes. Still, Lyonne is great, the cameos are mostly excellent, and generally speaking you'll be wearing a big smile as you follow each story as this season progresses.