Premiering in 2023 with a 10-episode first season, Poker Face quickly established itself as one of my favorite original streaming shows. The setup is terrific (Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale has a natural talent for instantly sniffing out bullshit). the serialized plot is exciting (Charlie forced to live a life on the road fleeing from gangsters), and the structure of the episodic mysteries is unique and super fun (replete with a number of great one-off appearances from terrific actors). This opinion was only reinforced during a recent rewatch of the series, and my anticipation is extremely high for Poker Face Season 2 – set to make its premiere on Peacock in May.
Everything we’ve seen from the new run suggests it’s going to be another wonderful ride full of reverse mysteries and colorful characters, and I’m excited to see Charlie employ her unique gift in new ways to find justice. Because of the show’s capacity to surprise, it would probably be foolish to anticipate everything that’s going down in the next 12 episodes, but I do have a specific hope for Poker Face Season 2: less murder.
Poker Face Season 1 Has A Murder Magnet Problem
I have personally never witnessed a murder, nor ever been embroiled in a circumstance involving murder. The same is true for all of my close friends and immediate family, and I have to imagine it’s true for the vast majority of people who make up Poker Face’s audience. I’ll cede the fact that we all don’t live nomadic lives and travel in the same kinds of circles as Charlie Cale, but when you look at Season 1 from a macro perspective, it’s insane how many homicides the woman stumbles into.
It can’t be said that every episode of the seminal run features murder… but that’s just because “The Future Of The Sport” only features two cases of attempted murder. While traveling around the country for a year, Charlie’s adventures involved a guy getting pushed off a roof and beaten, a staged suicide, an electrocution, multiple poisonings, an explosion, a trap door death, a faked car accident and a couple staged shootings. That’s a lot!
The murders in the first and last episodes play honestly because they are catalyst events that put Charlie on the road running from danger, but the fact that she constantly finds people killing each other in every stop she makes around the country is ridiculous. It renders the protagonist into a murder magnet, which is to say that there is a threat that she will become less of a character and more a plot device. Unless there is some big behind-the-scenes game plan that eventually sees Charlie’s regular proximity to death become a story unto itself, something should change.
I can already hear a lot of you in my head responding to this saying, “It’s a TV show! What about the suspension of disbelief?” To you, I will say that I respect your perspective, and it’s one that let me very much enjoy Poker Face Season 1, but what I think is more important going into the future of the show is greater creativity in the writing.
There Are Plenty Of Other Crimes That Charlie Can Use Her Skills To Try And Solve
This is not a unique issue in the history of television. Shows like Murder, She Wrote and Psych, as two examples, turned the towns of Cabot Cove, Maine and Santa Barbara, California into unlikely hotspots of homicide. It’s not a phenomenon that is hard to explain, either: stories need conflict, and murder is both an extreme and universally understood consequence that instantly sets high stakes for the killer, the bereaved and the investigators (not to mention that creating an imaginary murder is a fun creative exercise). But going to the same well over and over again is at the heart of lazy writing, and Poker Face has the opportunity to not be lumped in with that particular legacy of small screen mysteries by changing things up – and hopefully it’s done sooner rather than later.
There aren’t exactly a limited number of other options. Theft/grand larceny is an obvious candidate for exploration. Maybe Charlie makes friends with some people who are robbed of a precious family heirloom. Or maybe someone keeps jacking the register at a place she works and she has to find the person/people responsible before her asshole boss puts the blame on her.
Fraud could be a hell of a lot of fun. Imagining the perfect arch villain for Charlie Cale – the Professor Moriarty to her Sherlock Holmes – my mind conjures not a vicious murderer, but a con artist who can lie so impeccably that they don’t set off her bullshit detector. A hero figuring out how to work without their greatest skillset is a staple in fiction for a reason.
But what about assault? Abduction? Arson? Animal cruelty? Those are just crimes that start with the letter “A,” and all of them could make for great fodder in the future of Poker Face.
Naturally I don’t expect the show to abandon murder entirely, and the gunfire, explosions and more in the Poker Face Season 2 teaser don’t make me think that it will.
Still, mixing things up a bit beyond just various methods of death will hopefully end up being a part of the new run, as it could very much benefit the show long term in terms of verisimilitude and keeping things fresh.
With a stellar cast lined up including Katie Holmes, Giancarlo Esposito, Cynthia Erivo, Kumail Nanjiani, John Mulaney, Awkwafina, Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Justin Theroux, Taylor Schilling and Melanie Lynskey, Poker Face is making its long-awaited return very soon, and Season 2 is stacked with 12 new Charlie Cale mysteries. The first three episodes (the first directed by series creator Rian Johnson and the second by Natasha Lyonne) will premiere on Peacock on May 8, and there will then be a weekly rollout that will see the finale debut on July 10.