Spectre Collie

Category: Television

  • One Thing I Love About Poker Face: “Sloppy Joseph”

    One Thing I Love About Poker Face: “Sloppy Joseph”

    Earlier I said that I was hoping that Season 2 of Poker Face would start leaning away from the comedy a bit and more towards detective stories. Episode 6, “Sloppy Joseph,” isn’t really much of a detective story, but it was so well plotted and executed that it’s already become my favorite of the season.

    The setting is an elite private school for young children, and the concept of pitting an adult against a horribly-driven over-achieving child seems like it’d turn into a younger version of Election. They even used an equivalent to that movie’s use of Ennio Morricone-style music to show Tracy Flick’s rage; in “Sloppy Joseph,” whenever demon child Stephanie goes on the warpath, we hear “Spitfire” by The Prodigy.

    The unsettling black comedy about teenage politics in Election would be horribly tone-deaf with prepubescent children, so Poker Face wisely keeps it low-stakes. The murder here is upsetting enough to make you intensely dislike the villain, but isn’t on the same scale as, say, a man murdering his wife with a fireplace poker, or a woman murdering her sister by pushing her off a cliff.

    And yet, I loved how thoroughly this episode manipulated me. I really wanted terrible, life-ruining things to happen to that child. And for Charlie to bring down her horrible boss, who was clearly enabling the villain. So when we got the reveal of who was giving Charlie insider information to help bring the murderer to justice, I had to pause the episode. Just to say out loud how much I loved how they put everything together.

    My favorite moment in the episode is when Stephanie becomes outraged that Charlie’s figured out a way to use the kids’ kindness to defeat her, and she takes off to do the worst thing she can think of, “Spitfire” playing to represent her blind fury. There’s a camera cut and the music suddenly stops, just to remind us that this climactic moment is just a little girl running down a hallway. A teacher calmly and quietly says, “No running.”

    I loved having the realization that I’d gotten so caught up in the story, and so caught up in the injustice of the whole situation, that I’d started to think of it in the same way as the other episodes, which deal with actual murders.

    It culminated in such a sweet ending (before the final stinger!) that was a reminder of what seems to be turning into the season’s overall themes: having sympathy for and showing grace to even the seemingly irredeemable. And recognizing that “justice” doesn’t just mean punishing the guilty, but getting a resolution where everyone gets what they need and they deserve.

  • Two Things I Like About Poker Face Season 2

    Two Things I Like About Poker Face Season 2

    My take on the first episode of season 2 of Poker Face was that I appreciated that they committed to being unapologetically goofy, instead of launching into a long story arc and saving the silly episodes for mid-season. As it turns out, that does seem to be less of a fun and clever misdirection, and more a like a genuine mission statement for the season.

    All of the new episodes have been leaning hard into the idea that this is a comedy show first, a detective show a distant second.

    Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since there’s been some really good stuff in every episode. It’s still a very clever and funny series, and it’s doing stuff unlike any other series in recent memory. But as someone who really enjoys over-thinking popular entertainment, it doesn’t give me a whole lot to work with.

    A lot of the funniest and most satisfying moments in season one came from the format: seeing all of these weird connections forming as we go back in time and re-contextualize everything knowing Charlie was somewhere in the background, making pieces fall into place for later. Unfortunately, some of the clunkiest moments in season one came from trying to do straightforward comedy. Charlie running around wearing a horse’s head and doing slapstick being the prime example. I love it when smart, clever people let themselves be goofy and silly, but there’s a very fine line between silly and corny.

    Anyway, my favorite bit in episode 3, “Whack-a-Mole,” was when the mole was using an FBI lipreader to dictate a conversation through binoculars. Hearing tense dialog delivered in a flat monotone: always hilarious. Especially when the conversation diverged into musical theater.

    My favorite bit in episode 4, “The Taste of Human Blood,” was when the Flopa Cops award was being announced for Best Undercover Operation. As the winner “Diego” “Verbinski” “the Third” is announced, we see a nondescript janitor hiding behind a curtain at the back of the theater silently give himself a fist pump. Solid gold.1Yes, I’m aware that they had him show up later on, remove his fake beard, and announce that he’s a cop. I’m choosing to ignore that because the joke was perfect without it.

    Even though the jokes are broad — and Kumail Nanjiani’s Florida Panhandle accent is horrible, even taking into account it’s trying to be over the top — the episodes still fit squarely into the “voice” of Poker Face. The guest stars are John Mulaney and Richard Kind, Gaby Hoffmann (who, like Natasha Lyonne, is a New Yorker who acted as a child and teenager and had a career resurgence as an adult) and John Sayles as a cop trying to put an end to the “Florida Man” stereotype. And the transcendent moments when a character looks into the eyes of Daisy the alligator are the kind of surreal touch you don’t expect in a detective series.

    But more than that, there’s a strong sense of good-hearted morality to both of these episodes.2And the second episode, for that matter, although I didn’t have anything of interest to say about it. The first season had a recurring idea of Charlie being driven by a sense of justice, and we always had to see the bad guys get what was coming to them.

    So far in season two, there’s more a sense of sympathy for the villains. Even with the mostly irredeemable character that Giancarlo Esposito played, there was an attempt to get him out alive. A lot of the time in season one, I was yelling at the screen to try and get Charlie to stop walking into danger; with episode 4 of season 2, I was yelling at Fran the cop to stop before she went too far. And even mob boss Beatrix Hasp was given more sympathy than John Mulaney’s character. Maybe it’s because killing both Richard Kind and Rhea Perlman in the same episode would’ve gone way too far, but I was happy to see her get the promise of a life in witness protection.

    And that’s the last thing that makes Poker Face feel so unique: it’s eager to change up its formula and experiment with new things. The season one finale clearly set up the next season to have the same overall structure, which was abruptly wrapped up in episode 3. I’m not sure whether they planned it to be a curveball from the start, or whether they got partway into plotting the second season and realized they were bored of repeating themselves. Either way, I haven’t seen a series so willing to change its episodic TV structure and go off in new directions since The Good Place.

    I’d be lying (and everyone would be able to tell I was lying) if I said I weren’t a little apprehensive about where the rest of the season is going. I’d like it to lean back into the murder mystery side of things, and hit more of a balance between comedy and detective story. But I’d be even more disappointed if it settled into boring predictability and stopped trying to do weird, new things.

    • 1
      Yes, I’m aware that they had him show up later on, remove his fake beard, and announce that he’s a cop. I’m choosing to ignore that because the joke was perfect without it.
    • 2
      And the second episode, for that matter, although I didn’t have anything of interest to say about it.
  • One Thing I Love About Poker Face: “The Game is a Foot”

    One Thing I Love About Poker Face: “The Game is a Foot”

    I absolutely loved the first season of Poker Face and was already excited to see where it would go in the next season, even before the next season was confirmed.

    One of the many, many things I liked about it was that it was straddling multiple eras. It’s a celebration of classic television — not just in art direction, but in the anthology format, the prominent placement of guest stars, and most obviously, all the references to Columbo. But at the same time, it’s defiantly not a period piece, with many of the plots making use of ubiquitous smart phones, and an undercurrent of 21st century social media-driven culture running through everything.

    I’d expected the second season to follow roughly the same format, starting with an episode setting up the season-long premise of Charlie being on the run yet again, this time from a different unseen crime boss. So I was delighted to see that the first episode had almost no interest in being an “anchor” for very serious world- and lore-building, but instead just wanted to have fun being cleverly goofy.

    My favorite thing in the episode was the first act. The entire first season was an extended example of gathering some of the smartest screenwriters and giving them free rein to experiment with all the different ways you can use Columbo‘s reveal-the-killer-in-the-first-act formula. It always results in brilliant cases of seeing things in a new context: oh, here’s where we’re seeing the same events from Charlie’s perspective, or this thing actually happened because of that other thing, or this character was actually motivated by that. For anybody who’s ever spent any time breaking down a story, it made each episode feel like a masterfully elaborate magic trick.

    This episode piled so many layers of ideas on top of each other, with one complication on top of another, that you couldn’t help but feel sympathy for its villain, and feel her stress for the moment when everything would hopelessly fall apart. Even while the tone of everything was so deliberately wacky — ending the episode with TMBG’s “I Palindrome I” and “Someday mother will die and we’ll get the money” was a perfect, chef’s-kiss flourish — that I was laughing out loud more often than I have since watching The Good Place.

    When they first announced the season, it was with a huge focus on the guest stars, and Cynthia Erivo in particular. I assumed it was to piggy-back off of the huge press push for Wicked — not in any way intended to be dismissive of her work, but simply because I’m not familiar with her work but am extremely familiar with how network marketing works. And I was mistaken. This is absolutely a showcase for her, and she gives an outstanding, backwards-and-in-high-heels performance.

    I worry that it won’t be recognized as such, because it’s comedic. But the fact that it’s in such a broadly comedic episode is exactly why it’s so impressive. She has to play five different characters. All ranging in tone from completely grounded, to over-the-top caricatures. One of whom is a mild parody of her off-screen persona. Another who’s explicitly described as a bad actress. And is frequently having to play one of the other characters but still be immediately recognized to the audience as someone else. And who’s a bad actress afraid of being caught in a lie, but genuinely moved by hearing people being sympathetic to her real identity. It seems like something that’s made more challenging because the episode is so unapologetically silly.

    Jasmine Guy is also excellent at selling a performance that doesn’t allow for any trace of nuance but still has to feel real enough for you to sympathize with a murderer.

    And just like the first act kept piling on complications for Amber, the rest of the episode is just layers on layers of brilliant, dumb jokes. I want to see a full episode of Kid Cop Nights now as much as I want to see Spooky and the Cop. Especially the one where she’s on the hunt for the Zodiac killer. I love the idea of television producers (and a stage mom) so crass that they have a series starring a child set primarily at night, and they get around child labor issues by casting quadruplets. I love that ever since childhood, Amber has been so completely committed to making “butt-munch” a catchphrase. And I love the fact that the way Charlie finally figures out what happened (after initially assuming sixtuplets) is by making a connection through Kevin Bacon.

    Few things make me happier than seeing smart people having fun being silly and stupid. I love that the makers of Poker Face weren’t afraid of starting the season that went all-in on comedy, worried that it’d be too frivolous and would be better saved for later in the season, and they still came out with a kind of mission statement for the series. Even when they’re not making intricately-crafted murder mysteries, they’re making intricately-crafted, virtuosic television.

  • Survivor: Nope Island

    Survivor: Nope Island

    I was excited to see a poster and trailer for the upcoming reality series Got to Get Out on Hulu, hosted by a disappointingly shirt-wearing Simu Liu.

    There’s a frustrating sense that reality TV is playing it too safe, so I’m glad someone had the stones to Go There and make a series about a bunch of white people competing to be the first to take over a younger black person’s body.

    This will be a good sequel to the producers’ earlier cooking competition, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

  • A Sense of Like a Dozen Endings

    A Sense of Like a Dozen Endings

    What We Do In The Shadows will most likely be one of my top 10 television series of all time. It was never “appointment viewing.” I’m sure there’s a lot that I’ve forgotten, and I probably couldn’t give details of entire seasons, much less individual episodes. But overall, it was relentlessly1Because it does not relent clever, surprising, hilarious, goofy, and as much as I hate to use FX marketing language: fearless.

    One of the things that I most respect about the series is that the comedy and the tone were all over the place, but it always felt true to itself. It could be almost unforgivably corny, shockingly daring, and astonishingly clever all within the same episode, and sometimes within the same scene. One episode would feel like a traditional sitcom bottle episode, and the next would have an over-the-top bit of gruesome violence as a punchline, and the next would be a visual effects showcase that seemed far beyond the budget of a 30-minute comedy series.

    As an example of how varied its comedy was: the gags that seemed to take hold with viewers the most, like “creepy paper,” Jackie Daytona, or the cursed witch’s hat, were rarely my favorite, but were usually alongside the funniest moments of any television series I’ve seen. I don’t know what the production of the series was actually like, but it sure seems like they would ignore the concept of a “show bible” or a consistent tone or style, instead choosing that anything was fair game as long as it’s funny.

    Leading up to the finale, there was an episode inspired by The Warriors where the action was instigated by a character having his head burst like a tick and then ripped off at the neck; and then an unbearably awkward office party at a supremely shitty venture capital2Or is it something to do with lamps? firm, which somehow made me even more uncomfortable. The series will have some of the corniest jokes you can see coming from a mile away, followed up by someone vomiting a torrent of blood or having their entrails spill out onto the floor. And it rarely feels too over the top; always exactly the right amount of excess.

    That anything-goes mentality seems to have gone into the finale as well, where they decided to just try every possible ending they could think of. I only just found out that there are even a couple more I hadn’t known about — if you weren’t quite satisfied with the Newhart finale, you can go to the extra features to have Nadja hypnotize you two more times, with two more heavily-referential endings.

    The series could have ended with the penultimate episode. It didn’t give closure to everyone’s story, but it was a very sweet and fitting ending to Nandor and Guillermo’s. Gizmo finally realized he was never going to fit into the human world, and Nandor finally started to treat him as an equal partner, and he proposed a new life where they fight injustice.

    But it’s probably more fitting that the end of the series is the end of the documentary. It was full of meta-commentary on the series as a whole, in particular calling out the criticism that the series could’ve ended after season five had wrapped up the story of Guillermo wanting to become a vampire. I did appreciate that they explicitly acknowledged that the vampires were just going to keep on living their weird, stupid, after-lives, doing basically the same things over and over again for centuries. But it often felt more like it was giving closure to the writers more than the audience, giving them a chance to say goodbye to the series after six years.

    And I’d never blame them for that! But I do think that my favorite aspect of the finale was the documentary crew just stopping the characters mid-interview, saying that they had enough footage. It was so callous and disrespectful that it felt perfectly in tone with this series.

    The other thing that’s perfectly in tone with this series is taking it to the line of what’s tolerable, and even past that line, but then knowing exactly when to pull back. They can be so mean, or so gross, or so nihilistic, or so selfish and inconsiderate, or so violent, or so stupid, that the characters seem irredeemable and the writing feels like an overhard attempt to be edgy. But then they’ll have a surprising moment of kindness or cleverness that makes any sentimentality feel earned.

    They did exactly that with the end of the series, choosing to have it both ways. They got the tear-jerker where Guillermo says goodbye forever and turns out all the lights one last time… and then they got the adventure-nonsense ending, riding a high-speed coffin elevator down to Nandor’s hidden underground lair. The key wasn’t just the effects — which, again, seem like way overkill for a 30-minute comedy series — but the fact that Nandor and Guillermo got to sit in the coffin together, as adventure pals instead of master and servant.

    Now that it’s over, I do have a favorite moment from the entire series. Not the funniest, but the one that sums up exactly what I think is wonderful about the tone of What We Do In The Shadows. It’s in season five, when the vampires’ neighbor Sean is staging a pride parade as he’s running for office. Guillermo has just recently come out, and he’s given a special place in the parade: sitting by himself in a lawn chair on a flatbed truck, holding a sparkler and a piece of poster board reading “GAY GUY.”

    It’s a good gag on the surface, because the characters are paying lip service to inclusivity without genuinely getting it. The result was Guillermo going through all the stress and self-doubt of coming out, only to be tokenized and put on display.

    (As a side note: I liked how the show treated homosexuality as being distinct from Nandor and Lazlo’s hypersexuality; the series has mentioned the two of them having sex with each other and other men and male vampires plenty of times, but it never describes it in terms of romantic attraction, or as a part of their identity).

    What makes the pride parade my favorite moment, though, is what happens as the camera lingers on Guillermo. He initially seems humiliated and miserable, but as the parade goes on, you can see a smile start to take over his face. By the end of the episode, he’s waving the sparkler and bouncing along to the music. Finally happy with himself and proud of the label. In an episode that’s been all about callously and clumsily making a show of pride just to win inclusivity points, it makes a very sweet and even subtle point about how much it means to the participants to be able to be out and open and not afraid of looking ridiculous.

    That kind of satire, mockery, or nihilism followed up with a bit of sentimentality or kindness is what elevates What We Do In The Shadows from an extremely funny series to a memorable and even important one. It asserts that you can be smart without being elitist, sentimental without being maudlin, goofy without being pointless, shocking without being shallow, and have a tone that’s all over the place, just as long as you’re funny enough.

    • 1
      Because it does not relent
    • 2
      Or is it something to do with lamps?
  • Agatha the Irredeemable

    Agatha the Irredeemable

    Agatha All Along ended a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve spent the time since then trying to figure out what exactly I thought of it.

    My initial reaction was that I was a little disappointed. Midway through the season, it seemed like they suddenly decided they weren’t content to do another televised MCU installment, and they wanted to be putting out stuff for Emmy reels and best-of compilations. But I initially felt as if they’d managed to make all the plot threads fit together, but without the end result meaning much of anything.

    The last two episodes were genuinely surprising. For WandaVision, the big “reveals” had been mostly figured out by fans of the comics early on in the season, so that series was a case of watching stuff we already knew was going to happen, but in a way that was so satisfying and fun that nobody really cared. I’d assumed that Agatha All Along was going to do the same, presenting some not-particularly challenging mysteries and let us all have fun pretending to be surprised. “Oh, she’s still under Wanda’s spell!” “Oh, that’s Wanda’s son Billy Kaplan/Wiccan!” “Oh, she’s the Marvel embodiment of Death!” “Her sudden outbursts are foreshadowing things that will happen later in the series!” I was perfectly satisfied with this level of engagement, only to get a double rug-pull in the last two episodes.

    I hadn’t suspected at all that the Witches’ Road was Billy’s creation. I did expect that we’d meet a Great and Powerful Oz type character at the end, who had some connection to Rio, but hadn’t even considered the possibility that the entire premise of WandaVision was playing out again on a smaller scale. And it seemed kind of obvious that Agatha was lying about the road, and her experience with it in particular. But I’d thought it was going to be a simple case of undeserved bravado, claiming she’d been on it when she hadn’t. Or we’d see the rumor play out, where her previous trip on the road had presented a choice between the power she wanted (the Darkhold?) and her son. It never once occurred to me that the final episode would take agency back from Billy Kaplan and make the title of the series make sense! It was a really clever layering of surprises: he subconsciously created the road just like Wanda first created the Hex, but in the end, the instigator of the whole thing really was Agatha all along.

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  • Mid-season of the Witch

    Mid-season of the Witch

    Up until episode 6 of Agatha All Along, I’d been enjoying it a lot, if not exactly loving it. I couldn’t help but compare it to WandaVision, which I loved for being so aggressively meta and having each episode feeling like a dense puzzle box. But if Agatha All Along had tried to be as gimmick-driven, it would’ve come across as an uninspired retread.

    So I think the show runners used the extended gag of the first episode for all that it was worth, and then wisely set off in a new direction and allowed this series to be its own thing. Instead of each episode being themed to a different era of sitcom, each episode has been an escape room themed to a different decade. They’re still packed with easter eggs and references the MCU hyper-fans crave, but the episodes have felt a little more straightforward as a result.

    Which feels odd to type, when I think back on stuff like battling fire demons with prog rock, or an extended Evil Dead slumber party with Agatha hanging from the ceiling and backwards spider-walking. This is still some spectacle-driven television, high-budget even if not quite high enough budget to avoid cutting away right as someone turns over Elizabeth Olsen’s body. And all the elements of horror-comedy are there. The series deserves a ton of credit for sticking to its dark and weird tone without watering everything down. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t felt as cohesive; I haven’t gotten a larger sense of this is what the series is all about.

    Until episode 6, which jumped back in time to tell the Teen/Billy’s story from the start. And which was so well done that it’s retroactively made the entire series better. There weren’t any incredibly surprising reveals1My fiancé predicted the one returning character from WandaVision in another bit of stunt-casting, but I hadn’t seen it coming at all., but it all fit together perfectly, and it answered questions that I didn’t even know I had. There was way too much I liked about this episode for another “one thing I liked,” so here’s a bunch of barely-organized observations (with spoilers).

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      My fiancé predicted the one returning character from WandaVision in another bit of stunt-casting, but I hadn’t seen it coming at all.
  • One Thing I Like About Agatha All Along and also a bonus thing

    One Thing I Like About Agatha All Along and also a bonus thing

    I could tell that I had hit my over-saturation point with promotional material for Agatha All Along when I was watching an interview with Aubrey Plaza. The interviewer mentioned Patti Lupone, and I said — out loud, even though I was alone in the room at the time — “Oh, what are you going to say? That they lived together? That they were roommates? Oh, what fun! What an unlikely pair, huh? I bet there are some zany stories that came as a result of that, I tell you!”

    And I felt bad, because they seem like fine people, and it’s not their fault that YouTube and Instagram have spent years honing in on my interests to such a degree that I’m now getting practically nothing besides ads for and interviews about the series, all the time, on every possible channel. And it’s not their fault that Disney is so eager to promote the series. But what it does is really drive home the inescapable fact that the show is product.

    As is every piece of commercial art. It feels like a weirdly Generation X fixation to always look for the exact point when “art” becomes “commerce,” when the reality is that they’ve always been inseparably entangled. It’s just especially noticeable with something like Agatha All Along, which is not only a spin-off series, but part of a 14-year-old, multi-billion dollar multimedia franchise. The MCU has programming slots to fill, whether or not you’ve got a groundbreaking new idea to fill it with.

    That all sounds like a cynical, damning-with-faint-praise set-up, but the truth is that I’ve been enjoying Agatha All Along, and I’m pleasantly surprised. I loved WandaVision, and it’s still one of my favorite television series of all time, so I was predisposed to like the spin-off, but I was also predisposed to hold it to an impossibly high standard. From what I’ve seen so far — at the time I’m writing this, I’ve seen the first three episodes — it’s not particularly groundbreaking, but it is engaging and clever TV with a bunch of outstanding actors. Which as I understood it, was the whole point of the MCU on television.

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  • One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 3)

    One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 3)

    Previously on Spectre Collie… I couldn’t wait until I finished the season to mention more of my favorite things from each episode. Now I can finally round out the list with the last two episodes of season one.

    I’d been avoiding reading anything about the series, so that every aspect of it would come as a surprise, but I’ve seen that a second season has already been ordered by Peacock, so I’ve got something to look forward to. It’s good knowing that Rian Johnson has so much cachet (and so does Natasha Lyonne) that I can be pretty confident that he’ll end the series on his own terms, instead of letting it drag on indefinitely.

    Lots of unmarked spoilers, so please don’t read until you’ve finished season one!

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  • One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 2)

    One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 2)

    Previously on Spectre Collie… I’ve been so impressed by Poker Face that I already wanted to start calling out my favorite aspects of it even though we were only halfway through the season.

    We’ve still got two episodes left, but at the rate we’re going, it’ll be a while before we can finish the season, and I’m impatient. So here are some more favorites from episodes 6-8 of a series that continues to be excellent.

    Lots of spoilers throughout, so avoid reading this until you’ve watched up until episode 8.

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  • One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 1)

    One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 1)

    It’s probably inaccurate to say that I’ve been “surprised” by Poker Face, since I knew I was predisposed to love it based on Rian Johnson’s involvement alone. But I have been a little surprised by how much it’s been surpassing my expectations.

    I’ve got to acknowledge that I haven’t seen that much of Columbo, and I don’t remember that much about the episodes that I have seen, apart from the most basic premise (you know the murderer(s) from the start) and Peter Falk’s performance. But a huge part of what makes Poker Face feel so novel and so clever is how it’s all about manipulating the audience’s expectations and sympathies, and how it is constantly re-contextualizing what you’ve seen so far. It seems like they took the stuff I loved about Glass Onion and then spent an entire season’s worth of television exploring all the different ways you could change up or expand on the concepts.

    For the first time in a very long time, I’ve been loving a series so much that I desperately wish I could write scripts for it. Are spec scripts still a thing? Do I have to resort to fan fiction?

    I’ve already written about the first episode, twice, but I’ll try to keep things more focused this time. And this will only be the first part, because we’ve still only seen the first five episodes at this point. Lots of spoilers throughout; assume that you shouldn’t read any of these until you’ve watched episodes 1-5.

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  • Just Fine (Another Thing I Like About Poker Face)

    Just Fine (Another Thing I Like About Poker Face)

    I realize that it often seems like my blog posts are written by a LLM using the prompt “write about this in the style of a pretentious nerd under the influence of Ambien,” but I swear that isn’t the case. Even though, when writing about Poker Face, I did hallucinate an Agatha Christie story called Murder on the Nile.

    I also evidently ignored years of teachers stressing the importance of making outlines, because I started trying to make a few observations that quickly got away from me. One of them was about how much I like Rian Johnson’s assertion of ethics and morality in his works (that I’ve seen, of course): he doesn’t seem to care much for anti-heroes or ethical ambiguity, much less outright nihilism. He makes his values abundantly clear, but without ever being so didactic that it overwhelms the entertainment.

    The other was that there’s such an economy and efficiency to the first episode of Poker Face, where it reads as casual and funny on first watch, but you quickly realize that there’s hardly a single moment in the entire show that doesn’t serve a purpose.

    A great example of both: in the scene between Charlie and Sterling, Jr, where he’s setting up not just their relationship but the premise of the entire series, he starts the scene by offering her a drink. When she asks what her choices are, he seems surprised by the question. They’re in the owner’s suite at the top of a casino; she can have whatever she wants. Shortly after, we see her with Heineken in a can. Later in the episode, a bartender who knows her offers her favorite, and it’s a Coors Light. (She chooses coffee instead, which has its own repercussions).

    There’s so much packed into that. The question immediately puts Sterling on the defensive, which we soon learn is key to his whole character: he’s in charge of this whole place and can have anything he wants; why is she acting like his options are limited? She’s immediately found a way to change up the power dynamic, choosing to serve herself. And the thing she chooses, out of presumably a wall’s worth of expensive liquor, is a canned beer slightly fancier than the canned beer she normally drinks.

    That last part is important, because it’s the core idea of the entire scene that follows. The beer, and more explicitly, the conversation that follows, are all about establishing her character as someone who genuinely appreciates the value of having enough.

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