Slightly odd but highly successful concept vehicle from Knives Out's Rian Johnson about a former poker player who can always tell if someone's lying. She's played by the husky-voiced Natasha Lyonne (Slums of Beverley Hills). Q thinks she's a Columbo reinvention (voiced by Marge Simpson).
Starts out when she's involved in crooked poker game in Vegas, run by Adrian Brody; her friend is killed and she sorts it out. Quite enjoyable.
Different writers construct one hour mini-detective stories in different locations as she goes on the run. With guest stars. So in two, she helps trucker Hong Chau from being framed for gas station murder.
Barbeque episode (writer Wyatt Cain) is particularly delicious because of (a) the smells associated with different barbeque wood (b) a 'devil' dog and (c) a DJ who can impersonate everyone and is the voice of diverse TV shows. Danielle Macdonald features.
And she solves the murder of a drummer (an exuberant Nicholas Cirillo) in Chloe Sevigny's band.
Fabulous story (written by Wyatt Cain and Charlie Peppers, who's also the story editor) about two women in care home who seem rebellious and great, but Charlie realises they're cold blooded killers, and where at the outset we were on their side, we've suddenly very much not. Features The BBT's Simon Helberg.
Ellen Barkin and Tim Meadows are murderous theatre actors; Tim Blake Nelson is a racing driver also with murder on his mind (with Charles Melton). Nick Nolte is a special effects wizard who holds key to murder.
Great penultimate episode in the snow, 'Escape From Shit Mountain', echoing both Misery and The Shining (it's set in Colorado), written by Nora and Lilla Zuckerman, features a convict on remand Joseph Gordon Leavitt, his mate David Castanedo and a kleptomaniac Stephanie Hsu (The MMM, Everything Everywhere). I'd hoped the hunk Charlie hooks up with earlier would come to the rescue; but what's more satisfying is the final twist how Charlie catches the bad guy and ends up without an identity... Though the guys from Vegas catch up with her in the end, and the whole thing goes back to the on-the-run beginning (cueing, we presume, season two).
Like the seventies credits.
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