Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” movies are popular enough to have him doing Hollywood features full time. But he steps away from that success to bring something that really hasn’t been on TV in too long: A perfectly-made procedural.
The super enjoyable “Poker Face” (Peacock, streaming) stars Natasha Lyonne (of “Russian Doll”) as a unrooted woman with an unassailable knack: to know if someone is lying. That’s helped her in casinos, but also got her banned from them.
But that instinct (and thank goodness, not a superpower) also causes her to slow down, look at what’s in front of her, take it apart and put it back together again. Because she’s always on the lam, there’s a new set of characters in every episode and most of them are big names: Adrien Brody in the first episode, but also Chloe Sevigny, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Barkin, Judith Light, Tim Blake Nelson, Ron Perlman, Cherry Jones, Luis Guzman and Nick Nolte.
Only Benjamin Bratt, a gun-happy security guard, seems to be a constant, as he’s always on her tail.
The role is a good fit for Lyonne, who uses her wisecracking, hard-bitten persona in a way that almost suggests Peter Falk’s rumpled detective.
But the fictional detective she mentions is quite different.
“I’ve always loved particularly Elliott Gould’s portrayal of Philip Marlowe in Altman’s ‘The Long Goodbye,’” she told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour panel earlier this month.