Poker Face, a 10-episode series starring Natasha Lyonne, premieres on Peacock on Thursday, and the actress is on the trail of the truth (Jan. 26).
Lyonne’s character, Charlie Cale, a dealer at a casino, has the ability to read a person’s true intentions simply by observing their expression. Charlie decides to take her newfound ability to detect deception and her knack for solving crimes on the road.
Actress Natasha Lyonne, known for her roles on Orange Is the New Black and Russian Doll on Netflix has said that her character Charlie was influenced by Jeff Bridges’s Big Lebowski character, The Dude. Lyonne told the Associated Press that her character is “a person a little bit set back who’s kind of got sun on their face.”
She explained, “I’m generally more of a city slicker and someone who avoids getting hit by taxis and runs down in a subway.”
Rian Jonhson, the man behind Knives Out, created a mystery series in which Lyonne has a producing role. The New Yorker is reunited with her Orange Is the New Black co-star Dascha Polanco, who plays Charlie’s pal Natalie in Poker Face (Polanco also appeared in Russian Doll).
A number of well-known actors have made cameo appearances in the show, including Adrien Brody, Benjamin Bratt, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stephanie Hsu, David Castaeda, Lil Rel Howery, Jameela Jamil, Ellen Barkin, and Chlo Sevigny.
Co-executive producers include Maya Rudolph, Ram Bergman, Nena Rodrigue, Nora Zuckerman, Lilla Zuckerman, and Iain B. MacDonald. If you want to know how to watch Poker Face online, then keep reading!
Is Poker Face On Netflix?
Poker Face will not be available on Netflix, despite the fact that both Johnson and Lyonne have had previous success there with other projects. Rian Johnson’s 2019 smash hit Glass Onion and its 2018 sequel Knives Out: A Glass Onion Story are both available to Netflix users.
Netflix is available to anyone who wants it. Those in need of a Natasha Lyonne fix can still watch both seasons of Russian Doll and all seven seasons of Orange is the New Black. So where to watch Poker Face Oline?
Where To Watch Poker Face Online?
On Thursday, Peacock made available the first four episodes of the Poker Face. The streaming service is included in the subscription price.
No subscription? Happy tidings! The yearly Peacock plan is now discounted. You can join today for only $29.99 (down from $49.99). The 7th of February is the last day to take advantage of this exclusive offer.
Peacock has a monthly subscription option that begins at $4.99 for ad-supported streaming and $9.99 for commercial-free viewing. Peacock is available on multiple platforms, including televisions, computers, smartphones, and more.
Peacock has thousands of hours of binge-worthy content, including Hollywood hits and fan favorites like Poker Face, The Best Man: The Final Chapters, The Traitors, The Real Housewives of Miami, and Sick & Bel-Air.
In addition to the live streaming of major events like the WWE Royal Rumble on Sunday (Jan. 28) at 8 p.m. ET, Peacock is the only place to watch daily news, sports and pop culture programming, kid-friendly content, Spanish-language shows, and more. See the review of Poker Face in the next paragraph.
Review of Poker Face
Rian Johnson’s Poker Face, a whodunit series for Peacock, is one of the rare shows to actually be entertaining. Fun through competence porn, addiction, skewering social commentary, sexiness, suspense, or brain-numbing is the goal of many television programs.
But amusing, as in neatly organized and competently recorded visual pleasures with the sole intention of providing unadulterated pleasure? Uncommon and expertly conveyed by Poker Face’s easy beat and Natasha Lyonne’s charming, fumbling detective.
If Knives Out was Johnson’s theatrical smash, and if Glass Onion was bigger, more explosive, and more ridiculous, then Poker Face is Johnson’s ambition leveling out. Lyonne’s Charlie Cale is a fascinating Columbo update, and the six episodes available for review are solid, elegant entertainment that delivers a seemingly endless string of scene-chewing guest performances.
As a cocktail waitress in a Las Vegas casino, Charlie, a human lie detector fast to recognize bullshit, is hiding out from a tarnished poker reputation (it turns out, having a 100% accuracy read for bluffing is suspicious).
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Charlie’s enthusiasm for playing Encyclopedia Brown (as Sterling levels at her) after the death of a fellow waitress puts her on the run from Frost Sr. (voiced by Ron Perlman) and casino muscleman Cliff (Benjamin Bratt), the only recurring character besides Charlie, who are interested in using her unusual talent for a revenge plot.
Actually, there isn’t much I would want to ruin. Each 45-minute to 60-minute episode begins with a murder that Charlie stumbles onto and is, despite herself, compelled to find out the truth. The murders are gory but not gruesome, and the plots are clever-ish but never hard to unravel.
Poker Face’s primary comfort and biggest constraint is its take on the episodic model, which is ubiquitous to broadcast sitcoms and procedurals but less often on streaming platforms, and rarely with the spirit of play seen here. Knowing what Charlie has to uncover sets an extremely high bar for intrigue, making Poker Face’s slow pace and Charlie’s clue-finding feel too easy and, at times, rather monotonous.
Lyonne is given more responsibility by the framework to make learning what we already know into an interesting experience, and she succeeds. Her Charlie is gifted with the capacity to see through b.s., but she’s not a professional; she has a tendency to befriend the terminally ill and to convey her suspicions to the perpetrators’ faces. She is wastefully active on Twitter, where she primarily expresses her anger. She fumbles for her words, stumbles around, and occasionally manages a surprising reveal—but usually at great risk to herself.
Lyonne, who just had a career renaissance as a more macabre kind of investigator in Russian Doll, makes Charlie’s off-duty, on-the-run times the most engaging by making her a captivating ad hoc detective (not a cop, as she often assures).
Charlie is a cool guy to hang around with in some rough yet warmly captured locales because of his sun-bleached mop and tinted aviator sunglasses. In her moments of itinerant extroversion, Lyonne seems almost spontaneous, and immensely watchable; I’d rather watch her maneuver a casino floor, meet truckers at a Route 66 diner, or slink through midwestern dive bars than solve crimes.
Even though Peacock has only published the first four episodes, the show is not really made for binge-watching. Future episodes will drop every week, allowing viewers more time to enjoy the show’s leisurely pacing and the cameos by such luminaries as Lil Rel Howery, John Ratzenberger, Tim Meadows, Ellen Barkin, Jameela Jamil, Judith Light, John Hodgman, Chlo Sevigny, Simon Helberg, and Hong Chau.
Just like the rest of Poker Face, their faces are comfortingly familiar, and that’s a good thing. Even though Poker Face isn’t the most convoluted, complex, or cerebral murder mystery, it’s always a blast to watch.
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