Review: Poker Face, "The Game is A Foot" | Season 2, Episode 1

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of the second season of Poker Face. As always, this review is free for all, with subsequent reviews exclusively for paid subscribers—Josh’s reviews of the second and third episodes released today will follow tomorrow and Saturday. For more information on our schedule for the rest of the year and what your subscription gets you, check out our About Page.

“You call it a lie. I call it my truth.”

Well, it’s been a minute, hasn’t it? It’s a fun little coincidence that both Andor and Poker Face are returning for highly anticipated second seasons on their respective streaming services after multiple years away. (Am I thrilled that each of those shows aired three episodes this week? Uh…) Certainly, we can chalk some of that up to the dual actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023, but what it means for recappers (if not all of you viewers) is a necessity to revisit the original storylines before returning to the world of the show. Poker Face, as any dedicated fan knows, is not the most mythology-heavy of TV shows; much like the 1970s-era NBC mystery procedurals that inspired this new series, specifically shows like Columbo, Poker Face is as much a show about vibes as it is a show about the death of the week and about a larger story.

That said, unlike Columbo, there is a broader arc at play in Poker Face, because the setup is different. Lt. Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department is just doing his job when he investigates a murder and drives the killers crazy by asking about just one more thing. But Charlie Cale is quite proudly not a cop, and seems almost allergic to the concept of settling down anywhere, doing anything. That’s awfully convenient, too. As “The Game is A Foot,” the first of three episodes premiering today on Peacock, begins, Charlie is still very much on the run from the Mafia.

She escaped one Mob threat last season, but ran right into a bigger one in the form of Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman), whose promise to kill Charlie sent her back in her Plymouth Barracuda to the wild blue yonder. As we once again meet Charlie, two things are obvious. First, she’s still extremely content floating adrift across the United States working in odd jobs. And second, Beatrix Hasp is not Sterling Frost, Sr., who favored a slow-burn approach of tailing Charlie in the first season. An introductory montage to Charlie makes it very clear that if Hasp’s goons could shoot straight, she’d already be dead.

Of course, we don’t meet Charlie first, because that is not how Poker Face operates. As was the case with the first season, I have to make peace with this show’s format of moving back and forth in time. As noted above and in my season-one recaps, Charlie’s not a cop, and yet we expect her to solve a murder each week. And since she’s not a Jessica Fletcher or Miss Marple type, the fact that Charlie is so often and so unexpectedly close to people who wind up dead is something that constantly must be explained. We rarely see Lt. Columbo before a body has hit the floor, but when we do, the script doesn’t have to clarify why he’s there. In Poker Face, it’s not just that we need Charlie’s presence clarified, it’s that the show rarely pushes its runtime beyond an hour a week. Thus, the investigatory aspect of the show, in which Charlie reveals her inexplicable talent for spotting bullshit as a way of accusing someone of murder, only takes up the last 20 to 30 minutes of each episode.

That can be a challenge, especially since the murders in Poker Face are intentionally intricate in their level of detail, especially in “The Game is A Foot.” When you become so invested in a show like this, it can be easy to forget that until you try to get into the weeds. For example, a couple nights ago, my wife mentioned that my 10-year old son’s school is doing a Wicked theme for its Teacher Appreciation Week. (I asked why that was the theme everyone landed on before realizing that logic didn’t enter the discussion as much as deciding what’s popular. I should be glad it’s not themed to the godawful Minecraft movie.) My son is, like his parents, a big theater geek. Thus, I felt compelled to note that if he was a few years older, he might well have enjoyed “The Game is A Foot,” seeing as, to paraphrase The Simpsons, it features four Elphabas. I also tried to briefly explain the premise of the episode (eliding some of the more adult touches) before I realized exactly how complicated things get. And that’s before Charlie shows up.

You see, once, there was a set of quadruplets, Amber, Bebe, Cece, and Delia. Their mother Norma (Jasmine Guy) pushed them to the world of acting, so they could star on a TV show called Kid Cop Nights. The show was big (especially in Indonesia, after the fact), but Norma was the worst kind of stage-mom harridan, hoarding as much of their royalties as possible. Three of the quadruplets went off to pursue their passions, be it DJing or teaching or working in an apple orchard. But Amber, the hammiest of the four young women, was stuck under her mother’s thumb. When Amber learns that her mom has changed her will right before her death, to give all her fortune to a mysterious person named Felicity Price, it’s baffling. When Amber learns that Felicity is a secret quintuplet that none of the siblings knew about, she turns to murder as the only resort.

When Charlie enters the proceedings, it’s through Delia, who works in the aforementioned apple orchard and would love to use her presumed inheritance to buy said orchard. Charlie’s simply happy to have a new friend, and to have avoided the clutches of Beatrix’s men for an extended period. But she can’t help herself when Delia arrives at Norma’s wake, meets “Felicity Price” and spots bullshit immediately. That, of course, is because only Amber met the real Felicity, a mixed-media artist working in Vermont; adopted her entire look (including a distinctive nose ring); and threw her off a nearby cliff. The punny title of this premiere gives away a bit of the “game:” Amber realizes only after killing Felicity (and filming a fake pre-suicide video for her family’s benefit) that her hidden sister has a prosthetic foot and she has to concoct a half-baked explanation for why “Amber” lost her foot in her faux-suicide. That only adds to the bullshit Charlie can identify, even if she takes a bit longer to realize why Amber is lying through her teeth.

The convoluted nature aside, “The Game is A Foot” is a solid return to form for Poker Face. The first and last moments in which we see Charlie serve as something of a bookend, reminding us that she can’t settle down even if she wants to. (You really do get the feeling that if it wasn’t for Beatrix Hasp, Charlie would be content hanging out with Delia on an apple orchard for a long time.) But that aside, the murder aspect is well handled – yes, it’s complicated, but the show effectively lays all the details out without skimping on anything. And although Amber is not a terribly sympathetic killer, you at least can understand why she would be compelled to get rid of her gleefully awful mother.

But most of all, what I liked about “The Game is A Foot” is how incredibly funny it is. Some of the humor is verbal, as in Charlie’s inability to say “sextuplets” correctly or in the family lawyer being both sympathetic and not particularly good at his job. (Casting Jin Ha, who I last saw as a…uh…key character, let’s say, in the most recent season of Only Murders in the Building, helps make this attorney seem so out of his depth.) And then there are solid visual gags, like the journalist character in Kid Cop Nights being named Scoops McGillicuddy, which is just the funniest possible name you could think of. Add to this the fact that Natasha Lyonne and Cynthia Erivo have such good chemistry together, and this is a very enjoyable opening episode. (Charlie’s dry response of “Oh no, I’m gonna lose my pension” when she decides to leave the orchard earlier than her shift allots made me laugh out loud.)

If I have any issues, it’s in what happens at the very end of this one: Charlie gets shot at again. Just as the case has been solved, and as Delia has walked away much richer than she could have imagined, Charlie is about ready to ride off with her new pal before being reminded that she’s still on the run. At what point does this added element to the mystery-of-the-week procedural become tiresome? Poker Face did some version of this in its first season, which was fine, but jumping from the frying pan into the fire is something that will only be so tolerable for a second season.

Stray observations

• If there had been an even more extended montage of Charlie working at random jobs and getting shot at, I would not have complained.
• Rian Johnson capably directed this first episode, and while much of it feels the same as last year, that shot of Amber standing near the cliff feels like Johnson and team showing off a bigger budget.
• Even though he showed up last season as an in-show murderer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does get a fun little shout-out for his time on Kid Cop Nights.
• I’m only 40, but boy, did I feel old looking at Jasmine Guy acting as someone who’s about to shuffle off this mortal coil, thinking, “…but you were in A Different World. You can’t be that old!”
• They call her Norma, but why not avoid the potential Sunset Boulevard reference and name her Rose instead, a la Gypsy?
• Let us all use this bullet as a place to hold space for Cynthia Erivo, who is very, very funny in this episode. A lot more heavy lifting on her end than Lyonne’s in this installment, and she does it with ease.
• I will note that I rewatched this episode soon after checking out Another Simple Favor with my wife, and let’s just say Cynthia Erivo is much better at playing multiple roles with distinctive personalities than Blake Lively.
• Many good one-liners here, but a stealth favorite is “Is this a riddle or an aneurysm?”
• I should’ve known that Rian Johnson, Natasha Lyonne, and company would do a riff on an episode like “Double Shock,” a superlative Columbo episode featuring the late Martin Landau as identical twins with vastly different personalities. So for my first recommendation this week, I won’t be pointing that one out, as I did so back in the first season. Instead, to tie in with “The Game is a Foot,” let’s instead showcase “Lady in Waiting,” a 1971 episode of Columbo that is fascinating not just for being directed by Norman Lloyd (best known in his later years from St. Elsewhere), nor because it features a pre-Airplane! Leslie Nielsen, but because of its dated and more-than-mildly misogynistic representation of a meek female murderer (played by Susan Clark) whose post-killing blossoming into a more powerful woman ends up being a tell to everyone around her, including Columbo himself, that something is amiss.
• If you happen to also be reading my Andor recaps, I am pleased to share that I do have screeners for this entire season. And fair is fair: as I write this, I have watched all three of the episodes premiering today (but no further). That said, we’re parceling out the other reviews, so the second episode review will drop tomorrow.