| How to entertain yourself this weekend. |
Whodunits, howcatchems—is there any genre with a funny colloquial name that Rian Johnson isn’t the master of? —Alex Pappademas, culture editor |
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Poker Face, whose second season hit Peacock this week, started out as a pandemic-era lark for creator Rian Johnson. After diving into Peter Falk’s classic police-detective series Columbo as a lockdown binge, the writer-director fell hard for both Falk’s performance and the comforting, repetitive, self-contained structure of episodic television from the 1970s. In Columbo—and virtually all other non-soap-opera TV dramas of the era—there’s no broader mythology, grand mystery, or superstructural narrative hanging over each episode. Each week begins with a new murder and ends with a resolution and a reset, setting the show up to do it all over again next time.
But Columbo also had a somewhat unique structure—rather than a “whodunit,” in which the audience works toward a solution to the mystery alongside the detective, the series was a “howcatchem,” in which we see the murder happen and then watch the killer squirm as Columbo unravels their seemingly-perfect crime. For Johnson, who at the time was working on the first Knives Out—a classic whodunit in the Agatha Christie tradition—the show was a refreshing respite. Going from that to a true howcatchem like Poker Face was a natural move for Johnson, who over two decades in Hollywood has displayed a rare knack for finding unique angles on well-thumbed genres, from hard-boiled noir to time travel to the Star Wars universe.
In season two of Poker Face, Natasha Lyonne returns as Charlie Cale, the show’s wry, squinting non-cop Columbo, wandering the American countryside with a smirk as her sidearm, righting wrongs and protecting the weak from the strong, inhaling nicotine vapor and exhaling charisma. But instead of taking a second-season renewal as a license to start building out an overarching Big Plot—a time-honored move in the prestige-TV era, whose defining shows relied heavily on long-arc storytelling to keep audiences hooked—this batch of episodes pointedly throws out the cursory serialized plot left over from the first season and finds more pleasure in each individual story.
“We didn't want to start leaning on building up some kind of bigger mythology for Charlie,” Johnson says. “From the very start, I wanted to keep it meat-and-potatoes. Let's make every episode its own thing. Let's make every episode super fun in its own way, and let's find something genuinely different with each of these episodes that we're excited about, so that when the credits come up at the beginning of each episode, the audience doesn't know exactly what they're going to get.”
Johnson stepped out of an editing room at Industrial Light and Magic's San Francisco campus (he's putting the finishing touches on the next Knives Out film Wake Up Dead Man, which hits Netflix later this year) and jumped on Zoom to discuss the new season, the challenges and advantages of howcatchems versus whodunits, and the Knives Out celebrity cameo he calls “one of the highlights of my life.” —Abe Beame
To read the rest of GQ’s interview with Rian Johnson, click here. The first three episodes of Poker Face season two are streaming on Peacock now.
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