Poker Face Stacks the Deck

“Maybe my normal is just a little bit weird,” Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale says deep into the second season of Poker Face. The evidence adds up: Over the 10 of 12 episodes provided to critics for review, human lie detector Charlie gets outsmarted by an elementary-schooler who’s like a cross between Wednesday Addams and Damien Thorn, experiences spiritual nirvana while gazing into the eyes of a captive gator, and more than once resembles the insouciant, constantly snacking Bugs Bunny. “Weird” is Charlie’s constant, and it’s not exactly new. What is new is how Poker Face decenters Charlie so its villains can shine. In this more episodic second season, Poker Face’s baddies are a stacked deck.

John Cho proving the old adage that everyone is hotter in sunglasses, James Ransone reprising elements of Ziggy Sobotka as a thrills-chasing thief, and John Mulaney losing his temper when someone misquotes Stephen Sondheim. Simon Rex harnessing all of his skeezy charmer powers, Method Man putting a new spin on a wellness-influencer grift, and Alia Shawkat evincing the hard edge we’ll sadly never get to see in a third season of The Old Man. Poker Face’s first-season guest stars vamped it up, too; think of the Mountain Goats front man John Darnielle, longtime friend of series creator Rian Johnson, making his acting debut as a thieving metal guitarist. But that season had a couple of issues that this round of Poker Face smartly sloughs off: an overarching story line involving Charlie’s cards-playing past that sometimes felt like a drag on the series’ forward momentum, an overreliance on law enforcement as a storytelling tool. The series feels looser as a result, more dug in to its concept of a road trip through a series of mini Elmore Leonard–style crime stories and more willing to cede the spotlight from Charlie to the murderers, con artists, and thieves facing off against her. Through Charlie’s Bugs Bunny mimicry, Poker Face transforms her from active participant to audience surrogate, sliding her into the role of easy-breezy observer who gestures toward the chaos and says through a mouthful of carrot, “Are you seeing this shit?” Fun, what a concept!

Admittedly, it takes a little while to get to that sweet spot. Poker Face picks up some months after season-one finale “The Hook,” in which the FBI saved Charlie from murderous mob enforcer Cliff (Benjamin Bratt), Cliff testified against corrupt casino owner Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman), and Hasp gave Charlie an ultimatum about working for her. Having refused Hasp’s offer, Charlie is on the run from a pair of assassins in the first three episodes, which premiere together on May 8. Unfortunately, season opener “The Game Is a Foot” is a sludgy try-hard of an hour in which Cynthia Erivo plays five sisters in the same family fighting over their mother’s inheritance. This is Poker Face at its flashiest — Erivo rushing through costume changes and doing a range of accents, whip pans around a funeral where no one is really that sad, commentary on how Hollywood throws away child stars once they’ve aged out of their roles — but also its sweatiest. There’s a desperation to “The Game Is a Foot” that Poker Face thankfully shakes off, and once “Last Looks” and “Whack-a-Mole” put season one’s organized-crime story line to bed, the series starts cooking.

Poker Face is in the groove when its plots are labyrinthine and its attention invested in the desperation of everyday people pushed to the brink, and season two settles into a fine groove as Charlie moves around the U.S. trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. (Lyonne’s giant smile when she asks of a job opportunity, “Does it pay cash?” is a wonderfully telling detail about surviving off the grid.) Does Charlie miss having a community? She finds it in a group of animal-rights activists in Florida and a grandmother-and-granddaughter duo who watch Jeopardy! and Michael Clayton together in their rent-controlled NYC apartment. What about love? Corey Hawkins, playing a superstore manager who falls for Charlie while she’s doing deliveries for an Indian restaurant, is as flirtatious as he is kind. Are the cops constantly around to save her? Not so often, which helps the episodes’ endings avoid the same-y feeling they had the first time around. Those changes supply Charlie with more substantial relationships this season, and the varying ways they play out — some successful, some tragic, all affected in some way or another by Charlie’s ability to discern a lie — round out her characterization.

Now that Poker Face has hammered down its central gimmick and reemphasized its refusal to explain how it works (“That’s not really the point,” Charlie says), it can examine Charlie past her trick. Lyonne blunts her character’s edges with a warm smile and calmer affect as she lets her guard down around new friends, and then sharpens them again with staccato line deliveries and a persistent glare as the toll of so much death weighs on her. Charlie’s roiling interiority is a more engaging long-term through-line for Poker Face than her repetitive fleeing from either the police or the Five Families, and that emotional angle bestows a strong core the series’ goofy stuff can branch off of. The slapstick visuals of Charlie chomping into a giant turkey leg and vaping in a coffin; the twistiness of dialogue like “You want me to rat on my mole, like a snake?”; the joys of an episode-long homage to the perfection that is Michael Mann’s Heat and another that winks at the real-estate-related bloodshed of Only Murders in the Building. After the first season of Poker Face, it was hard to tell how much longer the series could stay in the game with its Lyonne-as-Columbo conceit. The confidence and recalibration of the second season raise that bet.