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Poker Face

The X-Files paved the way for a big shift in how TV series work. Serial storytelling, where each episode advances a larger story line, was very common in the early days of film, radio, and television. It has the inherent advantage of keeping an audience coming back for more each week — especially if you end each episode with a cliffhanger, as the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon perfected.

The problem lies with onboarding new audiences. If I missed the first episode of a slow-burn mystery show like True Detective or Fargo and instead tuned in mid-season, I would probably be lost. If the drama depends on complex world-building like Game of Thrones, fuggetaboutit. But if I tune into just about any episode of 1970s detective show Columbo, I’m not lost at all. Here’s this weird little guy who solves murders. No need to learn any dragon names.

In 1990, Twin Peaks rescued serial storytelling from the soap opera ghetto. The X-Files, which premiered in 1993, split the difference between “Monster of the Week” episodes and serial “mythology” story lines, setting an example for a generation of showrunners. Now that prestige television is almost exclusively serial, Poker Face intends to reclaim episodic TV from the doldrums of endless CSI reincarnations. Created by Knives Out director Rian Johnson and Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne, it is a self-conscious reinvention of the Columbo formula.

In the pilot episode, written and directed by Johnson, we meet Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a cocktail waitress at Frost Casino in Las Vegas who has an innate ability to determine when people are lying. If you’re thinking, “Charlie could make a killing playing poker,” she is way ahead of you. Charlie was using her disarming manner and human lie detector skills in backrooms and casinos when Sterling Frost Sr. (Ron Perlman) figured out her deal and gave her a job at the casino to keep her under control. Now that Sr. is retired, Jr. (a deliciously sleazy Adrien Brody) gets a notion to use Charlie to shake down a high roller. When her friend Natalie (Dascha Polanco), a hotel maid, is found dead next to her abusive boyfriend, everyone at first believes that it’s a case of domestic violence — sad, but all too common. Everyone, that is, except Charlie. Something about the way Jr. talks about the death of her co-worker sets off her Charlie-sense. In the ensuing tangle of flashbacks and reveals, Charlie ends up on the lam with Cliff (Benjamin Bratt), the Frosts’ head of security, in pursuit.

Every week, Charlie tries to settle down in a new place, but inevitably, someone commits murder, and her inquisitive nature and overdeveloped sense of justice get the better of her. It’s a little bit Murder, She Wrote, a little bit The Incredible Hulk (the ’78-’82 TV series, not the misbegotten Ang Lee movie), and a whole lotta Columbo.

The rather strict formula (a “howcatchem” in screenwriter parlance) means the pleasures of Poker Face are all in the execution. The stories have been uniformly good. Johnson and sister showrunners Nora and Lilla Zuckerman keep the settings proletariat: So far, Charlie has cleared a lesbian trucker (Hong Chau) of the murder of a Subway sandwich artist (Brandon Micheal Hall) and avenged the death of a barbecue pitmaster (Shane Paul McGhie). The talent on display has been impressive — in “Rest in Metal,” for example, indie film legend Chloë Sevigny is the singer of a one-hit-wonder metal band, her guitarist is the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, and her roadie Chuck Cooper has a Tony Award.

Poker Face is great, escapist fun, but not bingeable. It’s old-fashioned weekly appointment television, and when it’s done this well, there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Poker Face is now streaming on Peacock.