You watched Succession, and still feel drained by that brutal finale. You need a fun, frothy frolic to regroup. Perhaps a show about people who buy their clothes at Primark, not Prada. Enter the delicious Natasha Lyonne in Poker Face, Sky’s addictive crime caper, created (and sometimes directed) by Rian Johnson, who gave us Knives Out and Glass Onion.

Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a human lie detector who can tell whether the words out of anyone’s mouth are the truth or “Bullshit!” Charlie works as a cashier in a Vegas casino, alongside her best friend Natalie, who works as a maid (Dascha Polanco). Her skills at poker are sought by casino boss Sterling Frost Jr (played by a louche Adrian Brody). But when Natalie turns up dead, Charlie is roped into a cover-up that goes wrong and has to go on the run from Sterling’s sinister father, Sterling Frost Sr (Ron Perlman). She embarks on a road trip across America, fleeing from hitman Cliff Legrande (Benjamin Bratt doing his best to channel Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men) and taking menial jobs to survive while solving crimes along the way.

Rian Johnson drew inspiration from vintage wisecracking shows Columbo and Magnum PI, and there are shades of Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, too. Like Columbo, the series follows more of a ‘howdunit’ format, which means the murderer is revealed at the beginning of each episode, but that doesn’t make it less interesting to watch. The first season consists of 10 episodes, taking Lyonne from Nevada to Texas via Cleveland and Atlantic City. 

What makes Poker Face so bingeable is Lyonne’s incredible likeability. The trademark raspy voice, deadpan delivery, the way she says “bullshit” with just the right level of disbelief. You want to be her best friend, get a choppy bleached fringe just like her, and hang out drinking beer in her 1969 blue Plymouth Barracuda.

Johnson sticks to his favourite theme: a lone woman outsmarts the rich, the arrogant and the powerful. Charlie roots for underdogs and misfits: the abused maid, the lonely trucker, the weird roadie, the homeless hobo, the underpaid care worker. It’s deeply cathartic, but unlike a sermonising Benoit Blanc, Charlie doesn’t try too hard. She lives in her car and wears the same cut-off jeans every day. A refreshing change from Shiv Roy’s neutral pantsuits.

Interestingly, Charlie cannot use her phone for fear of being found by her hitman. Without being glued to her device, Charlie looks around and engages with people, reads their psyches, notices their behaviour and can tell whether they are lying, but can’t tell exactly why. She can’t use Google easily, so she has to use her own innate detection skills. This gives the series its delightful vintage feel. 

Despite a life spent on the run, Charlie is genuinely hopeful, cheerful and interested in people. It’s a welcome break from the usual morose, brooding TV detectives. I got a warm fuzzy feeling in my heart – a feeling I rarely get with most shows – as Charlie befriends various waifs and strays on the road.

Brody is excellent in his turn as a desperate casino boss. Guest stars include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nick Nolte, Hong Chau and Chloe Sevigny, who flit in and out, clearly having enormous fun. Part of the show’s appeal is guessing who will pop up in an unexpected role.

Many of the guest stars play against type. Chau plays a tough trucker who advises Charlie that you can only wear underwear twice on the road without washing it “because it has only two sides”. Law And Order’s S. Epatha Merkerson, who usually plays an upright cop, revealed why she jumped at the offer to play a domestic terrorist in episode five, which is set in a retirement home: “In the first 15 pages [my character] gets to say ‘motherfucker’ and I throw the finger. No one ever casts me like that.” Gordon-Levitt takes a break from playing good guys to take on the role of Trey Mendez, a white-collar criminal turned savage killer. The face-off between him and Charlie is the most chilling part of the entire series.

The dialogue is as funny and pithy as Lyonne herself. In one episode, driving through Texas, a stray dog adopts Lyonne. The dog turns out to be addicted to right-wing radio. “Did you know 86% of Mexicans have criminal records? They are erasing us,” says a radio host. “Bullshit,” says Charlie immediately, but the dog won’t allow Charlie to turn the radio off. “MAGA dog. Perfect,” deadpans Charlie. But it’s not all one tone; the show gets darker as it progresses.

Then there’s the captivating scenery: New Mexico sunsets, snow-covered peaks in Colorado, dive bars in Illinois and Ohio, all mostly filmed in the Hudson Valley. The soundtrack, featuring Tom Waits, Miles Davis, Paul McCartney and Zambian group Ngozi Family among others, is also full of Johnson’s famous Easter eggs. When Charlie receives a call from Sterling Frost Jr, Sam Cooke’s Get Yourself Another Fool plays as a warning, which she ignores. 

Lyonne rose to fame as Nicky Nichols in Orange Is The New Black, before going on to create and star in the much-acclaimed Russian Doll. She recently said her multi-hyphenated status as writer-showrunner-actor did not open the doors to commercial success: “Oh, it’s funny when you are the writer, the creator, the director and the star and you have 13 nominations or whatever, and it’s not like, ‘Here’s a bunch of Marvel movies.’ It’s much easier for the industry to accept men who are auteurs.”

If there is a flaw in Poker Face, it is that the episodes vary in quality. One episode, set in the racing car circuit and starring Tim Blake Nelson, is unsatisfyingly thin. The season finale, where we get Charlie’s back story, is also patchy. But it is redeemed by the appearance of a new villain, wonderfully voiced by Rhea Perlman. 

Poker Face has already been renewed for a second season, so Johnson has the opportunity to take Charlie to other corners of the country. The showrunners have a dream list of stars they hope to persuade to guest star, including the cast of Glass Onion and Knives Out. 

If there is one iconic scene that sums up Lyonne’s appeal, it’s in episode four, where Charlie works as a roadie for a metal band in the Midwest. An itinerant drummer asks why she lives in her car. Charlie replies economically: “Wolves on my fender, man.” “Some wolves, eh?” replies her fellow misfit. They then drive on, stoically. That’s all that is said, and all that needs to be said in the Poker Face universe.

Images: Peacock; Sky