#pokerface

IT IS STILL A WIP TROUGH! So it isn’t that long or great—

One of those things that’s kinda easy to lose track of is years, right? It’s not my fault, it’s just because I have a brain and that brain is made of meat and nobody’s is actually completely functional in the ways brains tell us they’re functional, which is really, really funny. Like the expectations for what I should be able to do are from a brain that’s never been able to do it and that’s been observing people with brains forever and never once seeing them actually being able to collate all their contents as if there was some expectable horror lurking at the edges of that possibility, seems pretty unreasonable and yet here I am going ‘well dang do I remember this timeline right or not?’ as if I should assume I can.

This isn’t about brains, not really, don’t fret about it, this is about Natasha Lyons? You know her? She’s the lady from the series Russian Doll, which is where I first encountered her and people talked about her like she was a recognisable name to them, and I know that because people talked about Russian Doll, holy hell. I think that tells me that back in 2019, when Russian Doll came out, I was still paying for a Netflix subscription, but at some point in that year I’m pretty confident I cancelled it? I think? These are the events in the timeline, jumbled up and I think lying in the right order, but of course, there’s a big event in 2020 that kind of defines all the timelines that I don’t remember happening anywhere on this thread.

Anyway, Russian Doll. Don’t really know what it’s about. I’ve watched two episodes, went ‘wow, I actually don’t care about what’s going on and I don’t think the answer’s going to be interesting,’ and stopped paying attention to it, but the reason I watched it in the first place was people talking about it because it was so, so, so good.

This also tells me I was on twitter at the time.

This isn’t about Russian Doll, this is about Poker Face.

Hold up hang on I think I gotta do a spoiler warning first.

I’m gunna describe some things that happen in the series Poker Face but only inasmuch as I describe broad story trope type things, I don’t intend to explain any specific things about what transpires in one episode or another. That’s a spoiler warning but it’s only a problem if you’re a total baby about things that you can even imagine are spoilers, like if you think knowing a movie has a twist in it ruins the twist, you should just, like, go somewhere else. Oh and on that same vein vis a vis warnings, uh, this series is about murders? If you’re not into murder stories, you should check out some non-murder stories, not this one, which is definitely a murder story. And specifically, one of the times the murder victim is a gerbil, and it’s pretty shocking even if I found it hilarious.

Great? Great!

Anyway, it’s not always murder but I couldn’t tell any of the schlubs on the other side of the spoiler warning that or they’d get all mad about it or something, I have to assume. I don’t think anyone really takes them seriously but I still think it’d be a kind of rudeness not to include the warnings. Like they’re the cookies out for Santa.

Anyway, uh, Poker Face, the thing I’m trying to talk about here, is a TV series that started as a Stan original then became a Peacock original and now I think both of those streaming services may be defunct because that pivot was always doomed I mean not even Netflix stayed what Netflix is supposed to be, and the series focuses on the character of Charlie Cale. Charlie Cale is this short, redheaded scrubby lady with a whole host of obvious deficiencies that work out to give her overwhelming charm as like, a blowdried version of a wet cat. In order to keep this from just being a wishlist on a dating app from most of my lesbian friends, though, Charlie also has a hook that makes her an interesting protagonist in a story, in that she is somehow able to always tell if someone is lying.

Okay, that’s not what makes her an interesting protagonist, it’s just a good power for short-cutting a lot of the storytelling challenges available to a mystery story that has to wrap things up in an hour. The story doesn’t have to show Charlie deducing things while she looks at different clues, she can talk about them with people, and her method is encouraged to involve talking to people, because that’s how she gets to hear them talk and then see how they lie or what they lie about or what it means when the story she explains stops being a lie. There are plenty of ways around it, not the least of which being that just asking ‘hey, did you kill them?’ to everyone is a great way to get people mad and shut down the conversation no matter what, and in a few cases she has to first work out that there was a murder.

Great series, great ideas, mixes up the formula a few times and it’s really fun to watch.

I mean just holy beans is this a series exactly like what I want to experience. I mean I already knew I was going to like it when I started to watch it, because it’s very obvious about the kind of show it wants to be. It’s trying to do a Columbo series, right? And I’m a big dumb mark for Columbo, it’s one of my favourite long-running TV series from the 1960s, which is hardly a long list but it’s also one of my favourite long-arunning TV series from the 1970s, and also one of my favourite long-running TV series from the 1980s, and so on. If you took my favourite Peter Falk movie-length material of the 1990s and asked me to rank them I might do a terrible job of remembering the names but I know that The Princess Bride doesn’t even break the top ten. And I like The Princess Bride!

And yet the thing is for all that I love Columbo and I really like Rian Johnson stuff (easily the best Star Wars movie I’ve ever seen for example), the most interesting thing I can say about Poker Face is what Poker Face isn’t. Or what it’s not trying to do. Or rather, okay, hang on, what form it has taken and how it does not resemble in ways that are meaningfully and easily and obviously represented in its form. You know what I’m just going to start again.

I think Poker Face isn’t really doing a good job of being Copaganda, if that’s what it’s trying to be.

The original Columbo series was Copaganda, at least, in the way that almost all pro-police media since Dragnet is in that structure. Columbo is represented as doing the things we want cops to do, none of the cops around him are awful arseholes, he actively routes around problems with criminals who aren’t doing something as important as the murder he’s trying to solve, and the guy doesn’t even have a gun. Columbo is about a fantastic kind of police force that honestly, I think would be pretty cool to have, but we don’t have, but people will think of Columbo before they think of things like abusive ticket-writing practices.

Now, Poker Face does have a good character who’s in the FBI and he’s kind of a boob. He’s a nice solid guy, but he’s also only promoted into various positions because of leads that Charlie gets him. There’s also an episode about cops at a cop convention and those cops are all useless and stupid, which is pretty fun. Thing is, I can hardly say that it’s ‘not copaganda’ because that’s not how these influences work, and also, there’s a very distinct problem where a lot of the time, the way Charlie deals with the murderers involves getting them handed over to the cops somehow. Which she can’t do, by default, because she’s not a detective?

I mentioned that right? Like, Charlie’s not anyone important, no authority, no monopoly on violence. She’s just a nosy lady who always knows when someone lies to her, and also she keeps showing up near murders. At least Columbo had an excuse for being around murderers constantly, he was a homicide cop. That’s the job. Charlie? Charlie might just be cursed.

The series is over. I think it’s got a good ending, and I think it spent all the quarters it had. It’s funny, it’s charming and all of it made me think about Russian Doll again. The way that things have changed, the way that I don’t use Netflix and Netflix doesn’t be Netflix any more and the way that a single distinct story that tells itself from start to finish is actually, a really good thing.

I loved it, I feel like it’s obvious I’d love it, but loving it made me think about the things in Columbo that I’d want to change if I wanted to make a better version.

I can’t wait to see what this inspires next.

Oh right, right, I remembered why I wanted to talk about this on my birthday: I can’t imagine a more uselessly me-focused piece of media if I tried. It’s even got a bunch of things that support it in the public eye that don’t work for me, hence the Russian Doll deviation at the start, and it’s a reminder that new things are coming out all the time that are good and also, also, that hey, maybe, just maybe, new things are better than old things and nostalgia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Yeah.

That’s the ticket.