Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.
Peacock streaming series “Poker Face” returns May 8 with the first three episodes of its second season. (After that, one new episode releases weekly on Thursdays through July 10.)
In this week’s season premiere, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) remains on the run from casino queenpin Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman) when she encounters the case of siblings, one of whom killed another, and they’re all played by “Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo.
It’s a fantastic acting showcase for Erivo, who carries the episode, playing both comedy and drama among the siblings. Erivo has far more scenes than Lyonne, who doesn’t even show up until 16 minutes into the hour.
Season two showrunner Tony Tost (“Longmire”) said he understands it’s the melding of Rian Johnson’s creation and Lyonne’s performance that made “Poker Face” a success in season one.
“It’s a marriage between his sensibility and Natasha’s, and my job is to help fuse that artistic marriage,” Tost said. “Rian is like Paul McCartney, a songwriter with all these pop hooks and intricacies. And then Natasha is like Lou Reed. She strides in with this soulfulness and this attitude and her own set of chops.”
As Charlie travels the United States in season two, her journey takes her to a minor league baseball stadium in North Carolina in the episode streaming May 22. Tost wrote that episode, “Hometown Hero,” which he said was a holdover from season one.
“Rian had always wanted to do an episode in a minor league baseball stadium, but he didn’t have a story, didn’t have a murder, didn’t have characters, just had the venue,” Tost said. “One idea leads to the next one and it builds from there.”
It was Johnson who suggested a plot twist that involves a ball player who drops acid, inspired by the real-life incident involving Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis, who claimed he pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD in 1970. Ellis even gets mentioned in the “Poker Face” episode.
“A couple of us in the writers’ room knew about the Dock Ellis thing, and as we were talking about it, we wondered, what’s a curveball to throw at the audience?” Tost said. “[Rian had] seen the Dock Ellis documentary and thought, is there something we could do with that? It did come from Rian, but it was very much a spur-of-the-moment thing. You’re just throwing out ideas and that one stuck.”
