Sweating through Poker Face and Blue Heelers

it's research... really!

This summer, while huffing and sweating with the free weights and treadmill in our basement, I watched season one of Poker Face.

Gravelly voiced Natashe Lyonne is great as Charlie Cale, a Vegas cocktail waitress with the ability to tell when anyone attempts a falsehood. She used this intuitive lie-detection to spot bluffers and clean up at poker until she was banned from the big games.

In the first episode, a less than scrupulous casino boss coerced her to use her skills one last time, to fleece a “whale”, a high-roller who’d been running his own game, and cheating the “house” of its share of the profits. (I watched this series as part of my research about the world of high-stakes poker, which features in the back story of a character in my current work-in-progress.)

The scheme to cheat the cheater does not end well, and sets in motion Charlie’s cross-country journey in her 1969 Plymouth Barracuda, as she evades capture by the casino boss’s hired gun.

Each episode places her in a new town, entangled in a new mystery. Along with her capacity to tell when people are lying, she also has deep empathy for those who are falsely accused of crimes.

Natasha Lyonne named Peter Falk as one of her inspirations, and the Charlie Cale character often employs the Columbo "there’s just one more thing” interrogation tactic before departing from the suspect.

Poker Face follows the Columbo style of story construction. The opening shows the guest star doing the evil deed, and subsequent scenes follow Charlie Cale’s pursuit of justice, and her eventual outwitting of the villain.

My favourite guest star was S. Epatha Merkerson from Chicago Med. She appears with Judith Light (who I remember from Who’s the Boss?) They starred as a pair of murderous residents at a high end senior’s assisted living facility.

I’ve watched the whole first season of Poker Face, and look forward to more.

In the mean time, I’ve returned to Blue Heelers, which ran 13 seasons from 1993 to 2006, and was one of the most popular shows on Australian TV. Now that I frequently spend time in patrol cars and squad rooms as a police chaplain, I have to say Blue Heelers comes closer than any other cop show I’ve seen, to what it feels like to hang out with real-life officers. (except the tv cops are a little less salty with their language!)