Moving Pictures

Tasteful Nostalgia

POKER FACE IS A LOVING HOMAGE TO 1970S CRIME SHOWS AND THE BREAKOUT SERIES OF 2023

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

FX/Hulu’s The Bear took streaming audiences by surprise last year, filling the pressure-cooker setting of a restaurant kitchen with family drama, surreal dream sequences, and lots of irreverent laughs.

It was a recipe for success that saw The Bear becoming a New Yorker cartoon, posted in a river of memes, and winning multiple awards including a Critics Choice Award and a Golden Globe for star Jeremy Allen White. NBC’s Peacock streaming platform dropped the first four episodes of its new crime series Poker Face on Jan. 26 and it’s quickly becoming this year’s breakout show. Poker Face stars the irrepressible Natasha Lyonne in a self-aware, neo-noir dramedy that’s brimming with tasteful nostalgia, lots of guest stars.

Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a casino waitress in Nevada. She lives alone in a mobile home alongside her peculiar neighbor John-O whose jet black pompadour pegs him as an Elvis impersonator. Cale is waiting tables when she’s summoned to the office of the casino manager, Sterling Frost Jr., played by a super slimy Adrien Brody. Frost knows about Charlie’s talent for detecting lies and her former life as a successful gambler. Frost recruits Charlie for a high stakes poker game at the same time that one of Charlie’s friends who’s a maid at the hotel turns-up dead alongside her abusive husband in a crime the police rule as a murder-suicide. Charlie smells a rat, and when she puts the pieces together, she turns the tables on Frost and runs for her life.

The New York Times critic James Poniewozik’s glowing review of Poker Face begins with the headline, “’Poker Face’ Is the Best New Detective Show of 1973.”

Lyonne’s Charlie Cale character isn’t an actual detective and the show is brand new, but I get it. The 1970s were a golden age for television crime series, and show creator Rian Johnson and his writers have pulled the best cards from that cigarette yellow deck of evergreen, small screen noir to add to their show’s winning hand. The series structure is founded on the “howcatchem” formula that made Columbo (1971-2003) so much fun. Every episode begins by introducing a new cast of guest stars before one of them winds-up dead. Then the action re-winds with Charlie added into the action. The bad guys and the viewers all know whodunnit, but the fun part is watching Charlie catch the liars in their own tangled webs.

Lyonne’s Charlie Cale is a rumpled mumbler like Peter Falk’s Frank Columbo, but her mobile home and sketchy back story recall James Garner’s Jim Rockford character from The Rockford Files (1974 -1980). Even her blue 1969 Plymouth Barracuda seems to share DNA with Rockford’s 1974 Pontiac Firebird Esprit. Shuffle in some of Telly Savalas’

Detective Lieutenant Theodopolis Kojak’s righteous justice and Poker Face is playing with a full house.

Every new episode of the show takes viewers to another stop along Charlie’s nomadic wanderings, but Cliff LeGrand (Benjamin Bratt), the casino’s sadistic head of security, always seems to be lurking in her rearview mirror. The show’s revolving cast includes guest turns from Chloë Sevigny, Hong Chau, Ellen Barkin, Nick Nolte, Tim Meadows, Luis Guzmán and more. There are fun appearances from Cheers alumni John Ratzenberger and Rhea Perlman, and Ron Perlman (no relation) plays Sterling Frost Sr. the owner of the casino and Poker Face ’s biggest baddie.

In addition to Charlie, Poker Face features women in roles as vagabond truckers, rock musicians and domestic terrorists. Thanks to the great writing, directing and acting these characters never feel like boxes ticked on a diversity score sheet. Instead, they’re fully fleshed-out people, residing in the backwaters of an alternate America where both the honorable and the wicked pray to a pantheon of gasoline, caffeine, nicotine and chance.

Watch Poker Face on Peacock. New episodes of the 10-part first season debut every Thursday

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www. joenolan.com.