Poker Face

A deliberately old-school TV show from an extremely contemporary creator and star. Conceived of by Glass Onion and Knives Out writer/director Rian Johnson, Poker Face stars Russian Doll’s Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a former professional poker player with the uncanny ability to always recognize when someone is lying to her. The killing of her best friend results in Charlie becoming a fugitive from the Mob, and she travels the country trying not to be noticed, even as she keeps solving murders that happen wherever she is. 

Johnson modeled the Peacock drama on classic Seventies TV mystery dramas, particularly Columbo, since we see the murders happen each episode before Charlie is introduced and begins doing her human lie detector routine against killers played by the likes of Adrien Brody, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Judith Light. And while there are some continuing threads regarding the people chasing Charlie, for the most part each episode can be watched on its own without knowledge of anything that’s come before, just like television was made for most of the 20th century. —Alan Sepinwall