If you haven’t heard of Poker Face, you must be avoiding the internet like the plague, because it’s all anyone’s talking about right now. From Knives Out and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery director Rian Johnson comes comedy drama unlike any other. Orange Is the New Black and Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a cocktail waitress with the extraordinary ability to tell when someone is lying. One fateful day, she leaves her mundane life behind to travel in search of new mysteries to solve. The series is a character-driven, case-of-the-week drama that closely adheres to the ‘howcatchem’ formula that was popularized by crime drama Columbo, which stars Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo.
In the debut episode, “Dead Man’s Hand,” Charlie is working as a cocktail waitress in a Las Vegas casino, then in the second episode, “The Night Shift,” Charlie (Lyonne) is injured and on the run, forced to make a pit stop in a desolate New Mexico. In “The Stall,” the third episode, Charlie takes a job at a family-run Texas BBQ house. And, well… you get the idea. The location changes episode-to-episode as Charlie travels across the States with every pit stop allowing her to meet a new cast of characters at the center of a different mystery.
Poker Face was filmed throughout the Hudson Valley, a New York state region that stretches along the Hudson River from Westchester County to Albany, the state capitol. As Times Union reports, “according to the director of the Hudson Valley Film Commission, filming was based in Newburgh, New York, and ran from April through October 2022, in locations throughout the mid-Hudson Valley.” Additionally, at least one episode of the series was filmed in late August 2022 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and some scenes were filmed at a casino in Laughlin, Nevada in September 2022.
Natasha Lyonne is joined by some exceptional talent, including The Grand Budapest Hotel‘s Adrian Brody, Lyonne’s Orange Is the New Black co-star Dascha Polanco, Quest for Fire‘s Ron Perlman, Looper‘s Noah Segan, Downsizing‘s Hong Chau, Never Have I Ever‘s Megan Suri, and Girl from Plainville‘s Colton Ryan.
The first four episodes of Poker Face released on Jan. 26, 2023, with the other six expected to release weekly on Peacock from Feb. 2 onwards.
