It’s noteworthy that an actor and a director with two of the most distinct sensibilities in Hollywood have come together to make the kind of syndication-friendly programming that you might have lost an afternoon to anytime in the past fifty years.
Each homicide is an excuse to spend some time with Lyonne’s character, Charlie, a croakily sardonic, authority-allergic roamer who’s less a detective than a righteous snoop. But Lyonne’s smirkingly wise presence, combined with Johnson’s fanciful yet humanistic approach to the mystery genre (most recently seen in “Knives Out” and its sequel, “Glass Onion”), renders their “Columbo” homage a hangout procedural. This premise is so silly that a different development process might have taken the project to CBS. On her new show, “Poker Face” (Peacock), a murder-of-the-week series created by the film director Rian Johnson, she plays a human lie detector: her Spidey sense goes off when someone’s not telling the truth. On Natasha Lyonne’s series “Russian Doll,” her character was closer to the former: a woman laden with familial tragedy trying to suss out why she keeps dying and then being resurrected on her thirty-sixth birthday. TV sleuths tend to come tortured (“True Detective”) or brilliant bordering on clairvoyant (“Sherlock”).
