Josh Reviews Poker Face Season Two!

Back in 2023, I thought the first season of Poker Face was a delightful revelation!  The show starred Natasha Lyonne (coming off of another amazing TV show, Russian Doll) and was overseen by writer/director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Glass Onion), and it was spectacular.  The show brilliantly balanced a retro approach — an episodic, murder-of-the-week show, with a “lonely man” type hero traveling to a new town and situation each week — with boatload of modern style and cleverness and the pleasure of having a spectacular female lead character.  Ms. Lyonne delivered a brilliant lead performance, ably assisted by an array of incredible guest stars who only got more exciting as the season progressed.  The show managed to be both emotionally rich and also enjoyably silly and playful.  I loved it!

I’ve been waiting with enormous anticipation for the second season to arrive.  I was thrilled that this wasn’t going to be a one-season-and-out show, and that season two was actually adding to the episode count, with twelve new episodes instead of the ten we got in season one.  I was also a little nervous, because of the news that this new season would be overseen by Tony Tost, replacing season one showrunners Nora and Lilla Zuckerman; would this change in leadership at the top affect the perfect balance of tone and structure we got in season one?

I’m not sure who exactly on the Poker Face team is responsible for what, but unfortunately while I still love this show and I enjoyed every single one of these twelve new episodes, I felt this second season was a little shakier than the first.  They weren’t quite able to recapture the lighting in a bottle to replicate what I felt was a perfect balance of elements in season one.

The tone this season felt broader than in season one; a little sillier, a little cartoonier.  It starts right away in the first episode, in which Cynthia Erivo plays five sisters, with a lot of Parent Trap type silliness in which one sister pretends to be another, and then Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) explains everything at the end in a long monologue that made it feel like I was watching an episode of Scooby Doo.  In season one, it felt like Charlie was in real danger from Benjamin Bratt’s character who was chasing her; here, at the start of the season she’s being chased by a bunch of goofy nameless hitmen who have worse aim than Star Wars stormtroopers.  In episode two the hitmen repeatedly fail to kill Charlie, and then that episode builds to crime boss Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman), who was introduced at the end of season one as a menacing figure, now reduced to hiding goofily in the back on Charlie’s car.

This season also felt uncertain in terms of its narrative structure.  While I wasn’t exactly over the moon by the way the end of season one replaced one menace for Charlie (Ron Perlman’s casino boss Sterling Frost Sr., and his thug Cliff, played by Benjamin Bratt) with another (rival crime boss Beatrix Hasp, played by Ms. Perlman), it seemed strange to me that season two did away with that thread after only three episodes.  We then got a few episodes of Charlie continuing to wander, albeit now not being chased… followed by a few episodes in which she tried to stay in one spot for a while (a change I quite enjoyed!), only to bring us back to the beginning at the end of the season by having her go on the run again, this time with yet another enemy chasing her.  I like that the show feels free to play around with its premise, but this yo-yo back-and-forth narrative this season just felt aimless to me.

All that being said, this is still a terrific show!  Ms. Lyonne is eminently watchable as Charlie Cale, a woman with the incredible ability to always be able to tell when someone is lying.  Charlie is an all-time classic TV show character, and Ms. Lyonne brings such joy and vivacity to her performance that she’s a pleasure to watch each week.  I love Charlie, who is so stubbornly iconoclastic; stubborn and relentless in her pursuit of righting wrongs.  I would happily watch many, many more seasons of her solving crimes!

We also got another incredible array of fantastic guest stars.  I love that each week we get to see a bunch of talented actors jumping into this show’s sandbox to play, and to give Charlie a new bunch of quirky weirdos (and a lot of murderers!) to bounce off of!  I mean, this season we got to see Cynthia Erivo (Wicked, Bad Times at the El Royale), Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Mandalorian), Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley, The Big Sick, The Eternals), Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Raya and the Last Dragon), Katie Holmes (Dawson’s Creek), John Mulaney (SNL, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Bear), Justin Theroux (The Leftovers, Wanderlust, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), Richard Kind (A Serious Man, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Only Murders in the Building), Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense, The Boys), Carol Kane (The Princess Bride, Scrooged, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), Sam Richardson (Veep, The Afterparty, Ted Lasso), Chris Bauer (The Wire, The Deuce, Thunderbolts*), Ego Nwodim (SNL), B. J. Novak (The Office, Vengeance), David Krumholtz (Serenity, The Deuce, Oppenheimer), Margo Martindale (The Americans), Gaby Hoffmann (Louie, Girls, Transparent), Geraldine Viswanathan (Drive Away Dolls, Thunderbolts*), Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Yellowjackets), John Cho (the Harold and Kumar films, J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek films), Adrienne C. Moore (Orange is the New Black), Taylor Schilling (Orange is the New Black), Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development)… and so many more!!!  What an ensemble!!!  I was also very pleased to see Simon Helberg (Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, The Big Bang Theory) back as FBI agent Luca.  He’s a great partner/foil for Ms. Lyonne’s Charlie, so I love whenever the show puts the two of them back together.

Want to dive into the season more deeply?  Let’s do it!

But beware some SPOILERS ahead, folks.

01 — ” The Game is a Foot” — The season kicks off with its guest-star game in high gear, with Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo playing five (that’s right, five) sisters.  It’s a great showcase for Ms. Erivo’s skills, but as I’d noted above, it all felt too silly and cartoonish for me.  Season one of this show was often funny, but the stories all felt realistic (discounting Charlie’s human lie-detector super-power).  However, this story felt too silly to me, too unbelievable.  And Charlie’s Scooby Doo monologue at the end, explaining the entire case, had me rolling my eyes.

02 — “Last Looks” — Giancarlo Esposito is great, super creepy & weird as a funeral-home owner, and it’s a pleasure to see Katie Holmes on screen again!  There’s more than a little resonance to seeing her playing a woman who married young to a controlling, powerful man.  It’s great to see the show again having fun with the behind the scenes craft of movie-making (like season one’s Nick Nolte episode).  But as I’d noted above, elements of this still felt too broad and cartoony to me, like the goofy hitmen shooting wildly at Charlie and crime boss Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman) hiding in the back of Charlie’s car.

03 — “Whack-A-Mole” — The great Richard Kind is amazing as always, as is Rhea Perlman.  It’s fun to see her character, Beatrix Hasp, finally get some time in the spotlight.  John Mulaney makes a great, funny villain — he’s terrific!  I was thrilled to see Luca again.  I’m glad he survived.  I always love seeing Chris Bauer pop up (my love for alumni of The Wire knows no bounds); he’s fun as the gruff head FBI agent.  The whole plane shoot-out scene felt again to me like this season is playing things too broadly.  (Also, I called the fake-out.)  It’s strange to me that they abandoned this season’s premise after only three episodes.

04 — “The Taste of Human Blood” — Kumail Nanjiani is terrific as the full-of-himself alligator-owning Florida cop Gator Joe, and Gaby Hoffman is just as perfect as Fran, the competent officer who keeps losing the Florida Panhandle Cop Awards (FlopaCopa) to that jerk.  But again, the episode winds up treading a few degrees too ridiculous for me.  Fran feeds cocaine to an Oreos-loving alligator so it eats its owner?  That was just too much for me.  I did like that Fran got a sort of happy ending!  (Better than jail, that’s for sure.)  That was a nice surprise!  I also loved the weird, trippy animation in the scene where Charlie looks into the eye, and soul, of the gator.

05 — Hometown Hero” — This is one of the strongest episodes of the season.  Charlie as a ball-girl at a small-town minor league baseball club?  What a great premise!  It reminded me of a lot Brockmire.  (And they also talk about the yips!)  Carol Kane is wonderful as the team owner, and Ego Nwodim is very funny as the cheese-loving ballpark announcer.  I loved the one-scene appearance of an animated B. J. Novak, who comes to Charlie in a drug-induced vision!  (It’s funny that the show gave us two trippy animated sequences in a row, in back-to-back episodes!  I like the stylistic playfulness.)  I was also interested to see the great Steve Buscemi recurring as a voice on Charlie’s C.B. radio.  This was sort of a positive version of Benjamin Bratt’s character from season one, popping up for a small bit in many of the episodes.  That was an interesting choice!  (Though I’ll say that I was really disappointed we didn’t get to see Mr. Buscemi in the flesh by the end of the season.  I really hope they include him in season three, if there is one!)

06 — “Sloppy Joseph” — This might be the best episode of the season!  This one would have fit well into season one.  I loved the format-breaking focus on, not a murder, but rather the war between two school-kids.  This one has just the right tone of silly but also serious, with real stakes.  (The death of the gerbil is quite horrifying!!)  I loved seeing both David Krumholtz & Margo Martindale, and Adrienne C Moore (who played Black Cindy on Orange is the New Black) was wonderful as the sweet teacher, trying her best!  (It was a cool Orange is the New Black reunion, seeing Ms. Moore back on screen together with Natasha Lyonne!)  And both of the kids were absolutely terrific.  This one was spectacular.

07 — “One Last Job” — Sam Richardson is hilarious as a dumb wannabe-screenwriter turned criminal.  I was sad that Charlie’s sweet boyfriend (played by Corey Hawkins) got killed!

08 — “The Sleazy Georgian” — I love a great con story.  (I’m a huge fan of the films of David Mamet like House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner).  Melanie Lynskey & John Chu are both great — I wasn’t sure who was conning who in that opening sequence!  I liked that this was another episode where we didn’t see a murder onscreen. (My least favorite aspect of this murder-of-the-week show is all the murders, so I like when the show finds ways around showing us another tragic killing.  Here, one victim dies off screen, but it’s suicide not murder, and the on-screen shooting winds up being a fake-out.)  I like seeing Charlie befriending the big guy getting picked on by John Chu’s character.  Once again, her open-heartedness helps save the day!  And I loved the fake-out with his husband at the end.

09 — “A New Lease on Death” — Watching Awkwafina and Alia Shawkat go at it was a pleasure.  It was fun seeing Charlie in NYC — she’s such a New Yorker!

10 — “The Big Pump” — Wow, I was surprised to see Charlie still in NYC, and still in the same apartment.  This was a fun stretch of the season, seeing Charlie stay in one place for a while, for a change.  I liked seeing Charlie in New York for several episodes, and I liked seeing her with a sidekick!  I liked this new character of Alex, played by Patti Harrison.

11 — “Day of the Iguana” — This episode was a lot of fun.  I loved the dynamic of Charlie and her new sidekick Alex, and it gave us a great twist with Alex framed for murder, needing Charlie to somehow bail her out.  I loved seeing Justin Theroux playing an international assassin (a playful reference to The Leftovers)!  It was fun to see a two-parter in this show that’s usually episodic.  Sadly, part two disappointed me…

12 — “The End of the Road” — The reveal that Alex was actually the Big Bad was a letdown to me.  The idea of an “Evil Leaper” character (that’s a Quantum Leap reference, for you younger readers) — an anti-Charlie who can defeat Charlie’s lie-detecting super-power — felt unneeded to me.  It feels like it breaks the show.  If people really CAN lie to Charlie, it puts a hole for me in the fun magic of the premise.  Plus, I just preferred Alex as Charlie’s friendly side-kick!  Additionally, the suggestion that the Iguana had the Mission:Impossible-like ability to imitate anyone felt too broad to me.  (When they suggested for a long while that the Iguana could be anyone, male or female, I rolled my eyes and checked out.  Thankfully they did eventually reveal that wasn’t the case, and that the Justin Theroux character was a separate person, but they took too long to get to that, in my opinion.)  The “to be continued” joke was mean — but on the other hand, I totally loved the gutsiness of it!!  That was the best part of the episode for me.  I completely fell for it and I was so angry for a minute!!  That was great.  I was sad to see Charlie lose her signature Barracuda!!  That car felt like a major character on the show.  I hope she gets another cool car next season.  It was insane to me that both Charlie and Alex survived that car crash.  Silly.  I liked seeing Agent Luca back for these final two episodes, and it was fun to see yet another Orange is the New Black reunion here on this show with Taylor Schilling playing the FBI agent working with Luca!  I’m of two minds about the ending with Charlie on the run again, this time from the FBIi.  On the one hand, I think it’s correct for the format of this show for Charlie to be on the run, so I think it’s good that the show returned to that idea.  On the other hand, it just feels so strange to me to abandon that premise a few episodes into the season only to wind up right back there by the end.  Also, it was a real letdown to me that we didn’t get to see Steve Buscemi’s character by the end of the season, nor did his character play into the story in any significant way.  Oh well.

While season two of Poker Face wasn’t quite the masterpiece that season one was, I still love this show and, as I wrote above, I had a great time watching every one of these twelve new episodes.  I think this is a show that has the potential for a great, long run.  Unfortunately, Peacock hasn’t yet renewed it for a third season.  I really hope they do!!  I want to see lots more new Charlie Cale adventures!

Please support my website by clicking through one of my Amazon links the next time you need to shop!  As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.  That means I’ll receive a small percentage from ANY product you purchase from Amazon within 24 hours after clicking through.  Thank you!