Poker Face

Poker Face has been pretty entertaining so far. Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a casino host with the talent of being a human lie detector. She can tell if you're lying about anything from playing cards to actual murder. She ends up going on the run and being an amateur detective solving murders across the nation. Each episode is its own story and has a great cast of guest stars each episode. It's being hailed as one of the best new shows of the year by just about every critic and the audience seems to really like it too. If you give this a try there's a good chance you'll end up watching the entire season.

My wife convinced me to watch this and quite frankly I wasn't expecting much. It just seemed like another "crime of the week" serial that was going to become stale and boring. It hasn't been that at all! Each episode has actual well-known actors that give great performances. Each episode is little a mini movie. The violence and effects are all very real - nothing cheesy here. I'm up to the season finale and can't wait to watch it. I'm definitely hoping this makes it through quite a few seasons. You do have to suspend belief a bit to convince yourself that she travels around and just magically stumbles upon a murder in every town, but you'll be pleasantly surprised if you can put that aside.

The Poker Face pilot is A+. This is a nice throwback to the murder mystery series that used to be common in the 70s/80s. So many TV shows have gone to the long story format it's refreshing going back to the story of the week format.

The pilot episode is a love letter to series like Columbo. In fact, Rian Johnson goes as far as borrowing some of the fonts from Columbo. If you enjoy this series and have never watched Columbo I highly recommend checking those episodes out. Poker Face has a great cast, it's superbly written, and directed.

Hopefully this series keeps up the quality of the opening episodes. I can't wait to see where they go from here.

That's right - what we have here is the Columbo formula with a female lead, assuming all of his famous quirks and manorisms - from the "one more thing" prods to smoking cigars, Natasha Lyonne delivers "mystery" solving fun as the gravel voiced Charlie Cale. Even the font used for the credits is the same as The NBC Mystery Movie (1971).

This is a small twist on the reverse-detective story made famous first by Frederick Knott in Le crime était presque parfait (1954) and later by Columbo (1971), where the full crime is revealed to the audience up front, and the fun to the audience is watching the sleuth figure it out by discovering all the little details the killers get wrong, and watching the killers squirm.

The twist here is that once the crime is revealed, in typical Rian Johnson fashion, time is backed-up and Charlie Cale's involvement in the setting is revealed. She doesn't witness the crime, but is in orbits of all the characters when the crime is committed. She then uses her "I can tell when they're lying" power to determine who the guilty persons are, and is used to great affect.

This is great fun, and I hope it runs for a long, long time.

Solid show. Great premise and each story for each episode is very interesting, mysterious, entertaining and is well structured with great characters with villainous motives. The only negative this show suffers from is predictability. Obviously she will continue to solve every single murder every episode using her power of perception in picking lies. There's no deviation from the formula and no surprises at the end of each episode except for the satisfaction that the bad guys got what was coming to them. Still, it's a fun show with great storytelling. Will be interesting to see how the season ends.