By contrast, Charlie Cale, the preternaturally gifted vagrant who is the heroine of Poker Face, sets out each week to puzzle through a different enigma that has nothing whatsoever to do with her own psychological backstory. In the first season of Russian Doll, the two-season series Lyonne co-created and starred in for Netflix, the mystery her character set out to solve was metaphysical and autobiographical in nature: What could she learn from her own past that might help her escape the time loop that was compelling her to relive the same fatal birthday over and over? In the show’s second season, that dilemma having been sorted, Lyonne’s Nadia found herself revisiting parts of her mentally ill mother’s life to understand the events surrounding her own birth. And like him, she is now the charismatic anchor of a quick-witted murder-of-the-week show that’s as irresistibly poppable as a bag of malted milk balls.

Like Falk, Lyonne has a knack for seeming at once spacily distracted and acutely observant. Lyonne’s raspy voice and shambolic energy have often been compared to the demeanor of the Peter Falk’s trenchcoat-clad detective, and the actress herself has cited Falk as a personal acting hero.

Given that influence, casting Natasha Lyonne as the series’ crimesolving heroine was a natural. Showrunner Rian Johnson has said that the show’s “howcatchem” structure, in which the killer’s identity is known from the start and the intrigue comes from seeing how our gumshoe cracks the case, is indebted to the crime procedurals he grew up watching, murder-of-the-week stories like Columbo. Though the new Peacock mystery series Poker Face takes place in the present day, the opening credits appear in a mustard-yellow all-caps typeface that pastiches the beginning of a ’70s network TV show, going so far as to include the title of each episode in quotes and the year of release in Roman numerals.

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