Poker Face, author and director Rian Johnson’s new homicide thriller, premiered final week on Peacock to fawning reviews, with Natasha Lyonne’s character Charlie Cale—a DIY crime solver on the run from on line casino baddies with a preternatural means to identify a lie—rapidly changing into a cult favourite. Who would have thought a remake of a dusty Seventies cop present can be such wealthy materials?

To be honest, Poker Face isn’t actually a remake. But as no much less a useful resource than the Columbophile Blog has identified, “Poker Face could be a Columbo reboot in all but name.” Both Johnson and Lyonne are avowed Columbo-heads, with Lyonne as soon as threatening to fight Mark Ruffalo over the proper to play the titular lieutenant. In interviews, Johnson has tiptoed around the inspiration, saying, “It’s kind of a throwback to Magnum P.I. or Rockford Files or Columbo.” Or he’d clarify that “like Columbo, we show you the murder in the first act. We show you who did it. And then it’s [about] how Natasha Lyonne’s character is going to end up catching them.” And when Vulture asked The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle how he ended up being solid, he gave away the sport: “I was probably bugging [Johnson] about something and he texted, ‘Want to talk to you about this TV show I’m doing with Natasha Lyonne. It’s basically Columbo with her as the detective.’”

To everybody who loves Columbo, it is a great point. Even past the distinctive format, with the assassin reveal occurring first—which implies it’s a howcatchem, not a whodunit—Poker Face embodies the tough, throwback, blaringly uncool charms of its religious antecedent. Like Columbo, Cale is usually going after the wealthy and highly effective, the type of people that suppose they shouldn’t need to atone for his or her sins. Like Columbo, she’s continually underestimated, a trait she finesses to her ends. Peter Falk’s portrayal of the fumbling detective is an all-timer; the best way he pivots from buffoon to razor-sharp gumshoe is a factor of magnificence and pleasure, which implies Lyonne has her work minimize out for her if she needs to place Cale up on the mantle with Columbo within the TV Sleuths Hall of Fame. But within the handful of episodes accessible to date (a brand new one dropped at this time), it’s clear Lyonne—salty, resilient, irrationally assured—is presenting a really distinctive form of crimefighter. 

In updating the supply materials, Johnson made some prudent decisions for our trendy tastes: Unlike Columbo, who was LAPD homicide police, Lyonne’s Cale is a civilian who simply retains stumbling into fishy deaths. She’s additionally blessed with the aforementioned means to all the time inform when somebody is mendacity, which provides a enjoyable, intelligent little hook to the present’s components. But whereas Poker Face very a lot takes place within the modern-day, as we are able to see from all the favored shopper tech that seems and at instances drives plot factors, it’s not beholden to modernity the best way Johnson’s earlier homicide thriller, Glass Onion, so clearly was.

And that extends to the very nature of the present. As Johnson explained recently to WIRED, whereas Poker Face has a by line, any given episode is a standalone. That was “a hugely conscious choice,” he stated, “something that I had no idea was gonna seem so radical to all the people we were pitching it to. The streaming serialized narrative has just become the gravity of a thousand suns to the point where everyone’s collective memory has been erased. That was not the mode of storytelling that kept people watching television for the vast history of TV. So it was not only a choice, it was a choice we really had to kind of fight for.”

By now, even an informal shopper can spot the markings of “prestige television.” The somberness, the grandness, the lavish funds. It’s virtually as if, ever since tv began being known as the brand new novel, it felt the necessity to amplify its personal significance. In that course of, it began dropping its enjoyable. By doing one thing as subtly daring as sneakily remaking Columbo, after which happening to make it a splashy success, Johnson has reminded viewers of one thing vital: There are some ways to make critically acclaimed, conversation-setting TV. Consider one other thriller solved.