‘Poker Face’
Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne looked at all the episodic, murder-of-the-week dramas of the ’70s and ’80s and said, “They just don’t make ’em like this anymore.” They saw something, said something, and did something — and that something is Peacock’s Poker Face. Lyonne plays the perfectly named Charlie Cale, a wisecracking screwup with a preternatural ability to tell when someone’s lying. And when you have a gift like that, you can either play poker or solve crimes — and Charlie’s already been blackballed from all the big poker games. This series takes all the charm of those old shows — Columbo, Murder, She Wrote, Hart to Hart — and filters it through Lyonne’s modern cool and Johnson’s whipsmart writing. It’s only January, but this is the show of 2023 (so far).