Rian Johnson’s Poker Face has been in many ways a conscious and deliberate blast from the past: a callback to the time before Netflix started dropping entire seasons in one fell swoop, when TV episodes were usually self-contained and the audience wouldn’t be lost if they missed the episode in any given week. When there wasn’t a vitally-important overarching storyline playing into every episode of the season, people could tune into an episode at random and still follow the thread of the story in comedies or even crime dramas that followed a “case of the week” format.
Why Does 'Poker Face' Work so Well?
Poker Face lives happily in this nostalgic bubble, focusing on virtually an entirely new cast and different murder every week with only a light sprinkling of overarching narrative transferring across the different episodes. With the ability to bring in celebrity cameos and fresh faces each week, though, the biggest and best selling point of the show so far has been the simultaneously novel and nostalgic character at the center of it all: Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale.
The appeal of Charlie Cale as a character is difficult to specify, mostly because it ultimately comes from several different aspects. On the one hand, Charlie is an atypical character in the murder mystery medium, as she doesn’t exactly fit the hard-bitten cop or sly Private Investigator type; on the other hand, though, her characterization is riddled with callouts and references to classic shows and TV sleuths. It is this strange admixture of traditional tropes combined with the untrodden territory offered by the character of Charlie that makes her such a fun and engrossing lead for the show.
Charlie Lives in Unexplored Territory for Crime Shows
The novelty of Charlie’s character is clear simply from the strange plot concept in the first place. Crime dramas, murder mysteries, and cop shows are generally inhabited by an expected type of lead character. Whether it be Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Alec Hardy, Harry Bosch, Jimmy McNulty, John Luther, or Adrian Monk, the protagonists of such shows tend to be primarily men, ranging from the “gruff and no-nonsense” persona to the “suave and self-composed” type to the “zany, brilliant, and antisocial” variety.
Charlie, however, ends up cutting against this particular grain in a number of ways. In a genre generally full of middle-class officers, inspectors, and detectives, she lives in a trailer, meandering from town to town and odd job to odd job. If there ever was a poster child for Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” Charlie Cale would fit the bill quite nicely — with the exception of the line about “no cigarettes.” There is a strange sort of charm in finally having an unabashedly lower class light-beer-swilling trailer-dwelling protagonist, and the curious charisma Lyonne brings to the role brings Charlie to life as one of the most memorable TV characters of recent years.
Admittedly, part of the novelty of the character also has to do with the setup of the show in the first place. Murder mysteries and crime dramas almost always focus on police and/or special investigators. After all, those are the types of characters who could reasonably be expected to deal with criminal activity on a regular basis and can form the foundation for the concept of a TV series. What Poker Face has done, however, is that it has created a murder mystery investigation show with a detective who has no connection with law enforcement whatsoever. Charlie is not a police officer, FBI agent, or private investigator; she is just a person with a nose for trouble who constantly finds herself unofficially investigating mysterious murders.
As such, there is also an unexpected source of drama in every episode that other crime shows never have to deal with: when Charlie figures out who the murderer is and how they did it, that is only half the battle. The real challenge becomes making it stick. When she doesn’t have the force of law or the backing of a police department behind her, how does she make sure the criminal gets a just punishment? It is the source of a new problem and a new solution in each episode, and adds another level of distinctive flavor both to Charlie herself and the show as a whole.
But Charlie Is Also in the Mold of a Classic Character
On the other hand, though, one of the most important factors contributing to the success of Charlie as a character is not actually the novelty, but the nostalgia. For all the appeal of Charlie as a distinctive character in the genre, her greatest charm might simply be the fact that she is Columbo.
There is really no simpler way of saying it than that. Of course the show itself is chock-full of references to Peter Falk’s Columbo, rising beyond the level of Easter eggs and forming the structure of each and every episode. Poker Face, just as Columbo before it, opens each episode with a first act that follows not the detective but the murderer, as the execution of the crime is played out in front of the audience. The detective only comes along in the second act, and as such both of the shows are structured not as a “whodunnit” but a “howcatchem.” The audience knows who did it; what they don’t know is how Columbo — I mean, Cale — is going to unravel this week’s mystery. The entire show seems like a cousin to Columbo, and the homage even structures the opening credits: the font type, color, and title card is exactly the same between the two shows.
The inspiration of Columbo goes beyond the story structure, though. Charlie herself is a Columbo of a new generation. Peter Falk’s beloved detective was distinctive for many of the reasons Charlie is in Poker Face. Columbo had a completely disarming persona: driving around in a battered old car and always wearing the same dusty old trench coat, he bumbled his way around the crime scene accompanied by his ever-present cigar and five o’clock shadow as he pursued the murderer with incessant seemingly irrelevant questions in his hoarse but endearing smoker’s voice. He played the bumbling gadfly to a T, tricking his quarry into thinking him a fool, right up until the moment he turned the tables on the murderer.
I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Charlie ended up being Columbo’s niece. She, too, plays into Columbo’s distinctively disheveled look, playing a disarming game in the role of an insignificant underling until the point at which she flips the script on the weekly murderer. She even shares Columbo’s taste for cheap beer and has the same endearing raspy voice, and some of Columbo’s distinctive patter makes its appearance in her periodic monologues.
As such, Charlie makes a mark as both a distinctive character and a remarkably nostalgic one at the same time. Perhaps most curiously, both the novelty and the nostalgia make for a compelling and endearing character, as the Columbo parallels are a welcome blast from the past, and the new tweaks to the character and format help that character to fly in the context of a show that is itself both traditional and new.