Poker Face is back for a second season of Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie calling bullshit on the lies around her as she falls into and out of quaint local murder stories and meets quirky characters played by brilliant character actors at every turn. Season one began with Charlie on the run from one mob boss and ended with her on the run from another. Season two picks up with her still attempting to evade hitmen sent by Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman), who are hot on her heels, so she’s once again never in one place for long. But before we even get to checking in on ol’ Charlie in the season premiere, we of course follow the show’s formula and begin with a murder and a slate of fresh of characters. In the case of the premiere, most of those new characters are played by Cynthia Erivo. Yes, the one and only Erivo plays not one but five characters in the Poker Face season two premiere, and she nails every frame.
Erivo plays a set of quadruplets (who discover they’re quintuplets, but I promise that isn’t a major spoiler) who grew up under the oppressive thumb of their mother Norma (legend Jasmine Guy) as child actors on a camp crime series called Kid Cop that looks like it was cooked up in the 30 Rock laboratory. The sisters are all distinct from one another but most share some level of insufferability: one’s a pretentious DJ, one’s a professor with a faux French accent, one’s an off-the-grid mixed media artist, and one’s a try-hard and bloodthirsty — in service of being money-hungry — ham, earning her the not-so-affectionate pet name Hamber. The fifth is Delia, perhaps the most normal of the sisters and Charlie’s entry point into their family’s web of murder and deception. Charlie meets Delia working at an apple orchard (this is after Charlie has fled part-time work as a parking lot attendant and a mummy at a haunted hayride due to Hasp’s goons showing up), and the two instantly bond when Delia lies to protect her.
I won’t spoil the specifics of the premiere’s murder or how Charlie eventually solves it, but the fuel keeping the pacing and story burning at every twist and turn is absolutely Erivo, who doesn’t just pull off playing five characters but makes it seem somehow effortless and like magic all at once. At some points, she plays a sister pretending to be another sister, achieving Tatiana Maslany levels of layered, detailed performances. It’s a fun gimmick of course, but it works on a deeper level, too, because Erivo’s emotionality, especially when it comes to the role of Delia, is so grounded and lived-in. She brings these characters to life quickly and memorably. That’s the fun of Poker Face — often the best characters are the ones we only meet once.
All the strengths of the mystery-comedy’s first season are on display in these first three episodes of season two, all of which dropped on Peacock today. As with all Rian Johnson, you can expect style and verve, retro aesthetics woven into the modern setting. Natasha Lyonne remains compelling as Charlie, but it’s always the characters who surround her that really determine the success of individual episodes, and these three deliver, Giancarlo Esposito playing a strange and myopic funeral director obsessed with death in episode two, Katie Holmes making a rare and affecting television appearance as his forlorn wife, and John Mulaney playing a milk-guzzling FBI agent in episode three, which also brings back Rhea Perlman for a delightful performance and shifts the narrative for the rest of the season in a major way.
Episode two is a testament to Lyonne’s strengths beyond Charlie; she co-wrote and directed the episode, which contains a lot of her signatures, including niche film references, killer needledrops, and a reverence but also self-aware humor for the movie-making business. It’s also the most emotional episode of this batch, Holmes in particular bringing depth to her tragic character. Still, it’s the season premiere that really stands out, in large part due to Erivo.
While more explicitly queer storytelling is to come, I promise, it’s not difficult to read queerness into these first few episodes, and honestly, I almost think of the universe of Poker Face as being somewhat queernormative but in an interesting way rather than a way that downplays or ignores queerness altogether. It’s easy to read Delia as queer, what with her flannel and beanie and mommy issues and immediate intimacy with Charlie — who is not queer herself as far as we know, but who much like her portrayer Lyonne could easily be mistaken as such and seems to attract the gays. And to be honest, I could conceive of any of the sisters being queer; perhaps Erivo just brings that energy to most of her roles. Sherry Cola, also bisexual, plays Paige, a tiny role in episode two who works in set dec for the in-episode film shooting at the funeral director’s home. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know a single straight person who works in set dec. I’m claiming Paige as one of ours.
The rest of the season promises a string of more queer actors, as well as one super gay episode, but I do love the casual nature of Poker Face‘s queerness, how so many of these tertiary and quaternary characters can easily be read as gay. There’s a real-world quality to it, and Poker Face is always at its best when working reality into its surreal, silly, stylized world.
The first three episodes of Poker Face season two are now streaming on Peacock, and subsequent episodes will release weekly.
