Big-hearted mystery show is flush with wit and charm

Sky Max's 'Poker Face' returns with more irreverent fun and a very human sense of chaos and jeopardy

- Phil Harrison

The vintage Plymouth Barracuda rolls on. Fittingly, it's slightly tatty but it has a vibe all of its own. As we rejoin Natasha Lyonne's hyper-charismatic human lie detector Charlie Cale, for a second season of what a narrative theorist would call inverted detective stories and we might think of as "howcatchems", she's still racing across America. She has a casino owner and an organised crime gang on her tail (initially, at least, they seem both spectacularly dimwitted and are terribly poor shots), but as if that wasn’t enough to cope with, she still can’t stop running into murder mysteries and she still can’t help solving them. Somehow, though, she still seems to be having fun. And, therefore, so are we.

Poker Face (Sky Max) is, in current TV terms, something of an anomaly. Created by Knives Out director Rian Johnson, it proudly sets its stall out to entertain, which often doesn’t feel like a given in the context of the labyrinthine longueurs of much streaming-era television. On the face of it, it’s a simple show; a “case of the week” throwback. While certain dramas wear narrative complexity like a badge of honour, Poker Face is as brisk, no-nonsense and free of airs and graces as the lead character herself.

Like the shows it most obviously recalls (it’s impossible not to mention