This article contains spoilers for Poker Face season one.
Unlike much of creator Rian Johnson’s work, Poker Face mostly plays it straight. The writer/director behind hits likeStar Wars: The Last Jedi,Knives Out, and Glass Onion has made his name on subversion. But Poker Face season onehas a formula and mostly sticks to it.
That formula follows this basic structure: We’re introduced to a new setting and new characters. One of those characters kills another. Time rewinds and we see the events of the episode so far again, this time from the perspective of Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), a human lie detector on the run from Sterling Frost, Sr. (Ron Perlman), the powerful man who wants her dead, and Cliff LeGrand (Benjamin Bratt), his right-hand man. Charlie slowly assembles the pieces of the truth behind the murder. She tells someone who was involved with that incident (unbeknownst to her) about her suspicions. They lie to try and point her in a different direction, setting off her bullshit detector. This leads to her figuring out the case, and the murderer is caught. As the episode ends, Charlie moves onto a new gig.
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The setting is vastly different each time. One week Charlie might be working as a roadie for a rock band attempting a comeback. Another week, she might be working in a practical effects workshop. The guest stars change, too, with Chloë Sevigny, Stephanie Hsu, Nick Nolte, Hong Chau, Adrian Brody, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt all making appearances. But the formula has to be fairly rigid for the case-of-the-week structure to work.
That sets Poker Face apart from much of the TV being made today. The show’s biggest boon is that Johnson and his team understand the power of formula. Poker Face feels like it was made by people who understand the benefits of episodic storytelling and know how to use its inherent strengths and weaknesses to their advantage. Much prestige TV feels like it was made by people who are attempting to fit a story into an episodic structure, rather than embracing the medium’s storytelling potential.
In that way, Poker Face andThe Last of Us, which wrapped up on Sunday, have completely different problems. Poker Face sagged a little in the middle because of how heavily it stuck to its formula. The Last of Us, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have much of a formula at all. It gave us two episodes setting up the series' premise, then pivoted bizarrely early in the season to a (good) episode focusing on two different characters we’ll never see again. I enjoyed Long, Long Time, and as a fan of the game I know that the show was only adopting the source material’s chronological positioning of Bill and Frank’s story. Still, it seemed emblematic of how little interest most current showrunners have in establishing a rhythm for their series. After only two episodes setting up the world and your series' leads you’re already giving us a feature-length episode about one-off characters?
That odd structure points to a broader problem with TV right now. If an episode’s runtime can vary wildly from the 75-minute “Long, Long Time” to the 43-minute finale, and if a season of TV can be anywhere from three to 26 episodes long, there’s less need to establish a strict formula. Why constrain yourself when a longer episode may fit the story better than a shorter one? Why stretch the story out of two dozen episodes when you can tell it in six? TV series are still working under budgetary constraints and, while the length we see may not be strictly limited, the number of shooting days behind-the-scenes certainly is. But TV’s amorphousness in the current glut era often prevents it from leaning into what the medium can do so well.
Poker Face isn’t entirely innocent in the runtime department. It’s longest episode was 67 minutes and its shortest was 46. But the formal rigor it displayed in sticking to its formula was a reminder that operating within stricter constraints can produce better, more creative art. As it approached its finale, it reminded me of the good, old-fashioned joys of this kind of TV. Historically, TV seasons have been 20+ episodes long. To keep a show running for that many episodes, showrunners needed to avoid big reset moments for most of the season. The pilot would be eventful, setting up the new status quo. If there was a mid-season finale, it would raise the stakes. And as the season finale approached, tensions would come to a boil. Keeping a series on the rails for that many episodes meant saving big moments for big episodes.
Poker Face worked in a similar way. Its pilot set the events in motion. The fourth episode, Rest in Metal, functioned as a mid-season fulcrum point as Cliff almost caught Charlie at the rock show. And as the season came to a close, the stakes were raised with Charlie having a near-death experience, getting caught by Cliff, getting framed for murder, and as the episode ended, getting a new set of obstacles for her to overcome in season two.
Instead of Johnson’s previous big structural subversions, Poker Face gives us small tweaks that might not have been noticeable if you weren’t watching week-to-week. When, in Exit Stage Death, the ‘how the murder happened’ section of the episode ended by revealing that two characters we thought hated each other were actually lovers, it was a surprise because we thought we knew how things were going to go down. When The Future of the Sport revealed that the character we thought died in the intro wasn’t actually the one driving the car that crashed, it was equally surprising, because we thought we knew where it was headed.
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Johnson’s work until now has assumed that audiences are familiar with the genre — whether that’s Star Wars or whodunnits or noir — and so subverted pre-existing expectations. With Poker Face, he’s working with a season of TV, not two hours of a movie. That change in format allowed the early episodes of Poker Face to set up the formula. The four episodes included in the opening batch dropped on Peacock on January 26 all follow that fairly rigid structure. But as the season approached its conclusion, Johnson’s subversive streak started to show.
And just in time, too. Though I had enjoyed watching Johnson and co. deliver satisfying, but traditional, takes on the howcatchem, the beats of the formula began to feel slightly too formulaic toward the middle of the season. As the season approached its end, that weariness with the formula began to feel like it was all part of the plan, like Poker Face was training you to know what to expect at every point in an episode, so it could surprise you all over again.
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