How the director of Knives Out and Star Wars reinvented a classic TV genre

Snapshot

• Rian Johnson, who has directed Star Wars: The Last Jedi and two Knives Out movies, has created new crime TV series Poker Face.
• It centres on Charlie Cale, played by Natasha Lyonne, whose special talent is knowing whenever someone is lying. 
• Like such old style TV series as Columbo, Magnum P.I. and The Rockford Files, each episode involves a new crime being solved and features such big-name guest stars including Adrien Brody, Ellen Barkin, Chloe Sevigny and Nick Nolte.

American writer-director Rian Johnson is making crime pay very well.

First he created the crowd-pleaser Knives Out, which was such a hit in cinemas that Netflix paid a staggering $US450 million ($650 million) for two sequels centring on Daniel Craig’s urbane detective Benoit Blanc. The first of them, Glass Onion, was a success for the streaming service over Christmas.

“I was missing the shows where you just tune in for an hour and you get an entire case”: Rian Johnson.Credit:Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Now Johnson, previously best known for directing Looper and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, has created a glossy streaming series inspired by classic crime shows like Columbo and Magnum P.I., centring on a crime solver who is just as distinctive, though she is much more likely to hammer down a beer, don a trucker cap and sleep in her car than the urbane Blanc.

In Poker Face – no relation to the Russell Crowe film with the same title – Natasha Lyonne (Orange is the New Black, Russian Doll) plays a former cocktail waitress, Charlie Cale, who is a human lie detector. She always knows when someone is not telling the truth, which is great for winning at poker until she starts making enemies.

“The genesis for this was me thinking about the kind of TV shows I grew up sitting on the carpet in front of my parents’ TV watching every day,” Johnson tells this masthead. “Thinking about Columbo and Magnum P.I. and The Rockford Files – those great, hour-long, high-quality, case-of-the-week shows – and realising that we’ve gotten away from that today.

“There’s so much serialised storytelling where the story takes place over the entire season, I was missing the shows where you just tune in for an hour and you get an entire case.”

Johnson describes Poker Face as a “how to catch ’em” rather than a “whodunit”.

The episodes show a crime being committed before Cale, who goes on the road in a Plymouth Barracuda to escape a ruthless casino boss, works out the killer and finds a way for justice to triumph.

“It’s something that Columbo did,” Johnson says. “We show you the killer and the killing in the first act. The rest of the episode is a chess game between the killer and Natasha’s character.”

Each episode includes a big-name guest star, including Adrien Brody, Ellen Barkin, Chloe Sevigny, Nick Nolte, Australia’s Danielle Macdonald, Hong Chau and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a human lie detector on run, in the Rian Johnson created series Poker Face.Credit:Evans Vestal Ward/Peacock

So, does having a woman solving crimes rather than Peter Falk in Columbo, Tom Selleck in Magnum or James Garner in The Rockford Files say more about changing times, the stories Johnson likes to tell or the streaming audience?

“To me, it says something about Natasha,” Johnson says. “Honestly, I wasn’t even thinking of it in those terms. I saw her work in Russian Doll and I saw something that’s incredibly rare, which is an actor who has a complete fully formed presence on the screen that’s so distinct and so charismatic.”

Johnson says he never watched Columbo for the mysteries.

“I watched it to hang out with Peter Falk every week. That’s what a show like this really needs. It’s like a sitcom in that way. You’re coming to hang out with your friends every week. So, it needed somebody who has that watchability to them.”

Johnson says Poker Face feels risky because the episodic storytelling is a throwback to the days when network television dominated viewing.

“There’s been a mass training or brainwashing into the notion that the only reason people keep watching TV is because there’s one story that stretches over the whole season,” he says. “I know that’s not the case because I watched TV for the first half of my life and all the shows I watched growing up were episodic. I know the power of falling in love with a character and wanting to come back every week.”

Johnson, who is writing the next Knives Out sequel, thinks Poker Face could have a long future.

“We’ll see if people will respond to it but in my mind, as long as Natasha wants to keep doing it, I feel like there’s lots of stops on the road ahead,” he says.

While making movies is his priority, Johnson is trying to figure out how he can fit in his expanding workload of crime productions.

“That’s one thing about TV,” he says. “David Mamet put it well: it’s like running a marathon until you die.”

The first four episodes of Poker Face drop on Stan on January 26. Stan and this masthead are owned by NIne.

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Email Garry Maddox at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.

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