I loved the first season of Poker Face and its various guest stars for each of the 10 episodes: Adrien Brody, Nick Nolte, Ellen Barkin, Chloë Sevigny, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Judith Light, Hong Chau, to name a few. And I found Season 2, airing on Peacock as of May 8 until July 10, just as exciting, with actors like Cynthia Erivo, Giancarlo Esposito, Katie Holmes, Kumail Nanjiani, Rhea Pearlman, in 5 of the 12 episodes available so far, with Carol Kane, Margo Martindale, Awkwafina and more still to come.
The comedic murder-mystery series was created by Rian Johnson, writer-director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), Knives Out (2019), Glass Onion (2022), and it stars Natasha Lyonne, as Charlie, a free-spirit on the run who has the gift of knowing when someone is lying, thereby fingering the killer in every small-town USA where her car, a blue 1969 Plymouth Barracuda, takes her.
Johnson and Lyonne cite as inspiration the TV series Columbo (1971-1978) with Peter Falk as a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, and The Rockford Files (1974-1980) with James Garner as private investigator Jim Rockford.
Garner had starred in Marlowe (1969), from the 1949 novel The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler, who had created the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe for his 1939 novel The Big Sleep.
Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe in the 1946 movie version of The Big Sleep directed by Howard Hawks.
Dick Powell was Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (1944) from Chandler’s 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely.
Among movie inspirations, Johnson and Lyonne mention:
Elliot Gould who played Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1973) directed by Robert Altman from Chandler’s 1953 novel.
Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski (1998) by the Coen Bros, that was inspired by the work of Raymond Chandler.
With Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, Chandler is a founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction.
It is refreshing to see a quirky woman like Natasha Lyonne play a character inspired by Philip Marlowe. The actress also produced Poker Face, wrote and directed some of the episodes.