Peacock’s Poker Face is just irksome

Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t you? The intelligence services would be lining up to employ you for interrogations; top law firms would pay you top dollar to act as their advisor; you’d win gazillions in all the poker championships; you’d never buy a dodgy second-hand car, not that you’d need to with all that money you’d have. Admittedly, though, your life and adventures would make for a very boring TV series because everything would be so easy.

Hence the tortured premise of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face, in which we are invited to believe that our heroine, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), has blown her skills spectacularly. Instead of playing poker, for example, at one of those high-stakes competitions in Vegas, and allowing herself to lose the occasional hand so as not to give the game away, she has gone around the country, playing for low stakes, and always winning, till word has got out — because gamblers always talk. An evil, shadowy casino boss has rumbled her, and threatened her (why? Why doesn’t he make use of her skills instead?), and forced her to stop gambling. Now she lives in a trailer park and ekes a living as a waitress in the casino.

My problem with this is the same problem I have generally with Johnson’s most recent screenplays, such as the overrated Americans-do-Agatha-Christie Knives Out, and that even more annoying farrago that Netflix inflicted on us over Christmas, Glass Onion, about the Elon Musk-style billionaire with the plot so infuriatingly convoluted you felt envious of the characters murdered in the first half-hour. And it’s the same problem I have with the whodunit genre as a whole: always but always, character — indeed plausibility of any kind — is subordinated to the needs of the gratuitously twisty, turny, well-I-never plot.

So, for example, Cale is by turns required to be tenacious, down-to-earth, jaded (as, of course, you would be in a world of relentless palpable insincerity) and all-knowing, yet, when occasion demands, she must be ditzy, feckless and naive. At one point, the plot line’s excuse for the latter is that she has drunk coffee (whereas normally she prefers beer), making her so garrulous and light-headed that she threatens to get herself bumped off by the baddies. Many, if not most, viewers will have tried coffee and experienced its effects: is it not a bit insulting of the script to demand that they conspire to pretend that this harmless stimulant can, on occasion, combine the effects of a truth serum with LSD?

Here’s another irksome thing. Cale has a deep, gravelly voice that bespeaks years of hard living. She has a trailer-trash twang and she drinks beer (some painfully blatant product placement for Heineken and Coors Light) out of a can. Yet she doesn’t smoke cigarettes. I find this as obtrusive and undermining as it was in that bar in Cheers all those years ago, the place where everyone knew your name but no one smoked. C’mon. If you’re going to set up a quintessentially implausible premise — a character can read lies — then you have a duty to your audience’s intelligence to counter the crazy bits by grounding the rest in verisimilitude?

The reason the Delingpole family ended up groaning through this nonsense — Boy: “you realize Adrien Brody is going to die at the end of this episode because he’s too big for a series like this and major actors only play these roles if they can play short-lived cameo villains?” — is that my initial viewing choice, a Netflix series called McGregor Forever about cage fighter Conor McGregor, was rejected in the first thirty seconds by the Fawn. It opened with an infamous and grotesque incident in 2021 when, mid-fight, McGregor’s ankle buckled and snapped. “Don’t look, Mum!” warned Boy, who knew what was about to happen. But it was already too late. “I’m not watching this,” said Fawn. (I may come back to it later, if I can find time for some sneaky private viewings with Boy.)

Rounding off this week’s theme of “shows I really can’t recommend,” I’d definitely give a miss to The Days, a Japanese-made drama about the nuclear reactor in Fukushima taken out by a tsunami. What I’d been hoping for, obviously, was a kind of oriental version of that fantastically gripping drama set in Chernobyl. But whereas Chernobyl benefitted from a world-class cast and a script that, though factually inaccurate, knew how to spin a ripping yarn abundant with conflict, tension and character insight, this one appeared to have been thrown together by the Japanese equivalent of the team that does the cheesy TV ads for DIY superstores.

Besides cardboard characterization, and comically inept acting, The Days had at least one other major disadvantage over Chernobyl: unlike the latter, which offered endless opportunities for blackly satirical takes on the corruption, ineptitude and buckpassing at a Soviet-era nuclear plant, this one was set in modern Japan where pretty much everyone is decent, professional, obedient, efficient and honorable. Props to the Japanese for having such a culture. But it doesn’t always make for the most riveting disaster drama.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.