Poker Face Season 2 continues Rian Johnson's Peacock mystery series, a loving throwback to the case-of-the-week detective shows of the 1970s. Natasha Lyonne returns as Charlie Cale, the wisecracking drifter with an uncanny, infallible knack for telling when someone is lying, a gift that keeps dragging her into murder after murder as she travels across America.
Back on the road in her battered Plymouth Barracuda, Charlie stumbles into a fresh set of standalone whodunits, each stocked with a rotating roster of guest stars. Season 2's lineup is loaded, featuring the likes of Cynthia Erivo, Awkwafina, Katie Holmes, Kumail Nanjiani, Giancarlo Esposito, John Mulaney and Melanie Lynskey, with the series' signature howcatchem structure showing the crime before Charlie unravels it.
The second season drew generally positive reviews, with critics again crediting Lyonne's magnetic lead performance and the show's inventive, star-studded standalone episodes, even as some felt the formula had grown familiar. Streaming on Peacock.
Arguably the best medical drama in television history, House thrives on genius writing and equally brilliant acting. Set in a teaching hospital at Princeton University, the show builds its plots around complicated, complex, elusive, credulity-straining diseases and a team of diagnosticians willing to move heaven and earth to find their causes and treatments. Long-time House fans eventually demystify the show’s dramatic formula, which devotes the first third to diagnosis and discovery, the middle third to trial and which seem to lead to a cure, and then the climactic ending which undoes all the drama of the first two thirds, curing the disease by revealing The Truth. Hugh Laurie plays Dr. Gregory House to perfection, sustaining the tension and contradiction between House’s arrogance and his irresistible compulsion to save people from their illnesses and often from themselves. One Los Angeles television writer sums-up, “A vicodin-popping, wise-cracking, gimp-guy who walks with his cane on the wrong side while he demystifies illnesses so bizarre they almost defy imagining—what’s not to like?”
