Peter Fincham recommends a great new homage to small town America

Succession is over! And my prediction that one of the Roys would be led away in handcuffs didn’t come true. There were some obvious points of controversy – has Tom Wambsgans got what it takes to survive as Waystar Royco CEO for longer than, well, a couple of days? Were those speeches at Logan’s funeral a bit too long? – but it’s been a hell of a ride and leaves many of us at a loose end on a Monday evening. What to watch?

If you’re looking for a perfect palate-cleanser, try Poker Face, which has recently arrived on Sky about six months after it launched in the States. What fun it is! It’s created by Rian Johnson, who’s also behind the Knives Out! movie franchise on Netflix. I’m not such a fan of Knives Out! in which Daniel Craig demonstrates that one thing he can’t really do is comedy, but I love Poker Face. The star of the series is Natasha Lyonne, whose voice is so gravelly she might be the lovechild of Rod Stewart and Elkie Brooks. She can do comedy, and much else besides.

Unlike Succession, Poker Face hasn’t got anything to say about power, or family dynamics, or politics, or the big things in life. It’s a weird and original mixture of murder mystery and road movie. Charlie Cale is a down-on-her-luck waitress in a Las Vegas hotel/casino who happens to have a superpower – she can tell when people are lying to her, 100 per cent of the time. In the first episode she witnesses a murder, solves it, and gets tangled up with the mob. There’s a wonderful performance as the man who runs the hotel/casino by Adrien Brody who, come to think of it, also gave a wonderful performance in Succession. Brody’s character Sterling Frost Jr doesn’t actually own the business – his dad does – and he’s got serious Kendall Roy issues. But that’s where the parallels with Succession end.

Charlie Cale escapes the clutches of Frost’s henchman Cliff (Benjamin Bratt) and goes on the road. Everywhere she stops, she comes across another murder. And every time she solves it.

There are all sorts of things going on in Poker Face. On one level it’s a homage to Columbo. Charlie says “one thing that’s bugging me, it’s probably nothing” in exactly the way Peter Falk did. Some detectives make a big entrance, some don’t. Charlie is very much in the “don’t” category, though she isn’t actually a detective at all, she’s on the run herself. In a particular episode she might be working as a cleaner in an old people’s home, or as a roadie for a one-hit-wonder band.

Poker Face is also a homage to small town America – filling stations on deserted highways, late-night diners, truck stops. Remember Steven Spielberg’s first movie Duel? It evokes that world.

And it’s interesting in its form. Like Columbo, it starts with the murder, which takes place in plain sight. We know who did it, which flies in the face of nearly every detective series that’s been made for the last 30 years. The pleasure lies in watching Charlie Cale crack the case and surprise all the people who underestimate her. In the first act we don’t see Charlie at all, we just see the build-up to the murder and the murder itself. Then we rewind to see that she’s been there all along, quietly observing.

Another unusual aspect of Poker Face is that, although Cliff the henchman occasionally makes an appearance, there are no other regular characters. It all rests on Natasha Lyonne’s shoulders – and believe me, they are broad enough. You may have seen her in Orange is the New Black which dates back almost to the beginnings of the streaming world – 2013! yes, that long ago! – and she was also in Knives Out!, but here she’s at a whole other level.

Visually Poker Face looks gorgeous, saturating the screen with vivid colours, a million miles away from the expensively muted hues we’ve got used to in the world of Waystar Royco. It’s a feast for the eyes, and has a soundtrack to match – the credits for the first two episodes play out to the strains of Junior’s Farm by Wings and The Goodbye Look by Donald Fagen. Heaven.

It took 13 executive producers to bring Poker Face to the screen (one less than Succession) and in an earlier article I said I’d attempt to explain what EPs do. In short, almost anything. In some cases it’s obvious – Rian Johnson gets an EP credit, and Natasha Lyonne herself. Nothing unusual in that, although obviously they’ve also got credits for the services they provide – write/direct/act etc. Other EPs will be executives at the network or the production company. They might control the money, or have nothing to do with that side of things at all. They might be closely involved in all aspects of the production, or they might have been at the first lunch when somebody floated the idea. They might represent the key talent, and demand to be an EP just because they can.

Does an endless list of EP credits tell viewers anything they need to know? Not really – they’re just a fact of life. A good rule of thumb about all credits is – is there any reason why we should care? You might watch a show and enjoy the music, so it’s nice to be able to find out who wrote it. You don’t really care who the production lawyer is, so why do we need to know? Only the production lawyer’s mum even notices.

To misquote Billy Wilder, nobody ever said, “I must go and see that movie, I hear the executive producer was good.” But do have a look at Poker Face – I have no idea which of the busload of EPs we should be thanking, but between them they managed to come up with something special.

Watch Poker Face on Sky.

Peter Fincham is co-founder of Expectation TV. Previously he was Managing Director of Talkback, Controller of BBC One and Director of Television at ITV.

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