The crime is committed in the opening portion. She promptly ruins the hotel’s reputation and profits, causing Sterling Sr to promise he will catch and kill her ASAP Cliff to try it immediately but fail and Charlie to flee and spend the remaining nine episodes/murders/guest stars (Nick Nolte! Chloe Sevigny! Joseph Gordon-Levitt! Ellen Barkin! Rhea Perlman and John Ratzenberger though not, alas, together!) on the lam.Įach of the nine follows the same format. Soon Charlie is noting lies, inconsistencies, timelines that don’t match up and concluding – thanks to a left-handed/right-handed shooter clue that is almost courageously basic – that her boss murdered Natalie. Sterling Jr sees a chance to use her to fleece the big shot at the private poker games which he has been illegally and frankly rudely running from his comped suite instead of spending all his time and money at the proper tables. She was given the job by Sterling Sr (voiced unseen at the other end of various phonecalls by Ron Perlman, so you can imagine he’s still in his leonine Beauty and the Beast getup if you want to cross your 80s streams) after he caught her using her gift to win suspiciously consistently at cards, on condition that she – you know, stop doing that.

Anyway, Charlie’s gift is just strong enough to pique her curiosity in any given scenario and help her along the way to solving crimes, but not strong enough for her to do so until at least 45 minutes and sometimes as many as 52 have elapsed and given the weekly guest star reason enough to turn up.Ĭharlie is a waitress at the same establishment.

On second thoughts, perhaps you should think of it as Columbo meets The Mentalist, if anyone remembers The Mentalist these days. The main change to the traditional format is that our heroine has an almost preternatural ability to read a person’s body language and deduce whether they are lying or telling the truth. It’s created by Knives Out director Rian Johnson and the gravel-throated Natasha Lyonne, of Orange Is the New Black and Russian Doll fame, stars as the infallible sleuth Charlie, who remains unfazed by the number and regularity of the killings that happen around her.

Poker Face is a modern homage to the classic murder-mystery-of-the-week shows which filled those parts of 1970s and 80s television schedules that hadn’t been colonised by soaps about oil tycoons and shoulder-pads.

Poker face show