I’d like to see you try and name a better mystery series on TV these days than Poker Face. Creator Rian Johnson (Knives Out) has taken the beloved Columbo formula and gone one better by creating the delightful cocktail-waitress turned amateur sleuth Charlie Cale, played by the ever-delightful Natasha Lyonne. Season One chronicled Charlie’s cross-country adventures trying to elude the casino boss who had put a hit on her because he blames her for the death of his faithless murderer of a son. 

Charlie is blessed – or cursed – with the innate gift of looking into a person’s face and knowing whether they are telling the truth or lying, and I never get tired of watching Lyonne mutter an exasperated “Bullshit” under her breath. She definitely has the Amateur Detective’s Curse, as everywhere she goes, Charlie stumbles into a murder. By season’s end, she had assembled quite the rogue’s gallery of murderers, played by one brilliant actor after another, including Cherry Jones, Adrien Brody, Judith Light, S. Epatha Merkerson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Barkin, Tim Meadows and Chloe Sevigny. 

It also looked like Johnson and his team of clever writers were about to repeat a winning formula: having resolved the conflict with casino owner Sterling Frost, Sr. by making amends with the man and then solving his murder, Charlie finds herself the target of rival owner/mobster Beatrice Hasp (Rhea Perlman) and sets off across the country yet again. But – and I told you these writers were clever – in the first three episodes (of the expanded twelve-episode long second season), the series resolves Charlie’s issues with Beatrice and sends our heroine into unknown territory.

So how did those first episodes stack up against the brilliance of Season One? I wanted to let you know in as spoiler-free a way as possible, and to do that I’m going to look at the episodes primarily from Charlie’s point of view, even if she comes into the story fairly late. 

In Episode One, “The Game Is A Foot,” it’s clear that Beatrice Hasp is a more determined enemy than Sterling Frost was. Everywhere Charlie goes, she gets shot at.  Eventually, though, she finds a deep enough hiding place to breathe, along with a job picking apples in a large orchard. She even makes a friend in fellow worker Delia Kazinsky (Cynthia Erivo). Charlie has a feeling she has met the woman before, and to her delight she that Delia once starred in one of young Charlie’s favorite childhood TV series, Kid Cop Nights.(The brief glimpses we get of that Disney Channel-type series are pretty funny.)

Then Delia gets word that her mother Norma has died, and she decides to head back home to the funeral – not to mourn but to try and get back some of the earnings that her mom had stolen from her. Charlie offers to drive her friend back home and lend moral support – which, of course, leads her straight into a murder and to a lying liar of a murderer. 

I’m not going to tell you more because half the fun lies in the myriad twisty turns the story takes. Suffice it to say that Erivo, whom I had the great good fortune to see live on Broadway in The Color Purple (I was the one blubbering like a baby in the second row!), is absolutely wonderful here and – well, let’s just say she displays amazing range. Lending great support are Jasmine Guy as Norma and Jin Ha as the socially inept family lawyer. My only small criticism is that the script sometimes tries too hard to be funny; a number of jokes take too much time to set up and then fall flat.

The second episode, “Last Looks,” takes place three months later and find Charlie relaxing on a Florida beach. With no sign at all of any of Beatrice Hasp’s goons, Charlie has started to relax. She has even given up smoking – and taken up vaping (she prefers the cotton candy flavor!) Going into town to buy some batteries for her vape cartridge, Charlie is accosted by a dude named Tommy who is the location manager for a movie company. He wants to know if Charlie will rent out her ’69 Barracuda for a 70’s-set film they’re making nearby. Charlie is always looking to make some cash, and when she finds out that the thriller takes place in a real-life funeral parlor, she even agrees to hire herself out as a corpse. 

The funeral home is owned and run by Fred Finch (Giancarlo Esposito), with the help of his make-up artist wife, Greta (Katie Holmes). There is clearly trouble in Paradise with this marriage, and the presence of the film crew doesn’t help: Fred is beyond annoyed by these trespassers, while Greta is enchanted by them. 

It won’t take you but a moment to figure out who gets killed by whom, and this feels like a much more “traditional” episode than the first one did. That said, the fun is in the details, not just of the crime itself but of the workings of the business. (Did you know they’re never called ashes – they’re “remains.” And modern technology allows you to store them in all sorts of unusual places – a high point in this episode.) Extra fun comes from the fact that the   killer’s plan allows them to lie with impunity to Charlie’s face. Thus, she has to rely on more than her gift this time. The climax is explosive, involving a good “Chekhov’s gun” moment that I am proud to say I predicted. And then there’s a lovely twist in the final shot, which takes Charlie and all her fans straight into . . . 

Episode Three,“Whack-a-Mole,” is a game-changer for the series, or, at least, for Charlie’s trajectory through it. Beatrice Hasp captures Charlie in order to turn her talents loose on a problem facing the lady mobster. All she wants to do is disappear into retirement with her beloved husband Jeffrey (Richard Kind), but Beatrice has it on good authority that someone in her organization is a rat. Or is that a mole? Or maybe it’s a snake . . . 

The structure of this episode is quite different. For one thing, it’s shorter than the first two by about twenty minutes. Charlie is in this one from the beginning – although the story does shift back and forth in time to fill us in on certain things. This is also the most genuinely funny episode of the second season thus far. It features the return of FBI agent Luca Clark (Simon Helberg) whose fortunes in the agency rose throughout the first season thanks to Charlie’s help. Now he is one of the agents in charge of bringing Beatrice in, along with his best friend at the FBI, Daniel Clyde-Otis (John Mulaney). You know they’re old friends because they sing Sondheim lyrics to each other all the time. 

That’s about all you’re going to get out of me concerning this episode, except that it manages to both follow and subvert the series’ traditional inverted structure. There are rats and moles and snakes (oh, my!) to be unmasked, and while the shorter running time makes the whole climax feel a bit abrupt, there are layers and layers of cleverness to be enjoyed here in Wyatt Cain’s script and in the combined performances of Lyonne, Perlman, Kind, Helberg and Mulaney. Finally, with the threat on her life by Beatrice Hasp and the Five Families neutralized, Charlie is free to go where she likes and live the good life. Except, with nine more episodes to come, don’t lay any bets on that happening for a while. 

Welcome back, Poker Face!