It’s a few months late, but it’s never too late to be happy. Premiers on SkyShowtime Poker Facethe series that critics and viewers loved when it aired in the United States, a case of the week proposal made by Ryan Johnsonwhich adds to this recipe the beauty of the mystery of Daggers in the backbut with more humor, more heart and a completely charismatic protagonist: Natasha Lyonne.
The central character is Charlie Cale (Lyonne, Russian doll), a woman with an innate ability: she can detect when someone is lying. It had nothing to do with body language analysis techniques, nor instinct, only Charlie could recognize that. It is not true what a person says just by hearing their voice.
The first episode featured as a guest star (the first of many) Adrian Brodythe boss of a casino and after what happens in this kind of introduction Charlie starts a flight across the country which is what sets the mechanism of the series in motion: At each stage the road leads him to another town with new characters where you can solve a new mystery.
As happened to Jessica Fletcher in It writes crime, one of the people you meet at each stop on your journey will be killed during your stay and each stage follows the same structure. “I’m a magnet for death,” Charlie says self-consciously at one point in the series.
In the first act, inspired by Columbus, someone dies and the viewer knows who is responsible for that death. In the second act, the series goes back days before the crime to reveal What did the hero do at that destination? and what is his relationship with the other characters. In the third, Charlie solves the crime and goes to his next destination.
This structure has proven to be infallible over time and produces a sense of complexity in the viewer, who previously knew the mechanics of the story. felt called to associate in two ways. First, try to find Charlie in the background of the first act or guess what odd job he will do in that town to end up being involved in crime.
The second and most satisfying: identify the moment in which the person who committed the crime betrays himself without realizing it, because if the series shows us anything, it is that people tend to lie unnecessarily and for the most stupid things. To solve the cases, Charlie does not follow the tactics of an investigator or detective, because he is not, most of the time someone will be a suspect for lying about something stupid that has nothing to do with happened.
The structure of the “case of the week” arises here with budget, production values ​​and guest stars typical of the luxury prestige series. Among the actors who appeared in the first season, in addition to Brody, were Ron Pearlman, Nick Nolte, Cherry Jones, Judith Light, Joseph Gordon-Lewitt, Chloë Sevigny, Hong Chau and Ellen Barkin.
In addition to the ability to stay fresh by changing settings and characters, the method has an added value, a pleasure that has been lost in recent years and that one does not know how much you missed one of them until it was tried again. : knowing that everything will be resolved when the end credits roll.
Poker Face has regained that charm and has the quality of a happy place that makes it so an appointment you don’t want to missbecause unlike real life, it gives you peace of mind that at the end of each episode the case will be solved and the bad guys will get what they deserve.
And despite having a recognizable structure, there is always room for surprise: it is an open door adventure in the unpredictable because the viewer never knows what strange murder their protagonist will face next week.
