When Peacock‘s Poker Face premiered back in 2023, my biggest complaint came from a place of privilege: There was so much to enjoy about creator Rian Johnson and producer-star Natasha Lyonne’s loving tribute to the NBC Mystery Movie wheel programming of the ’70s that when the series settled for being “very good” instead of “great,” that felt regrettable.
For two subsequent years, nearly every time I watched a show boasting The World’s Greatest Detective or a Human Lie Detector — TV writers love a Human Lie Detector like a Hot Zone virologist loves a HAZMAT suit — my takeaway was something akin to, “No, Elsbeth isn’t bad, but Poker Face showed how you could make basically the exact same show, only with a little bit more ambition and artistry.”
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