What's it like, always knowing the truth?
"Bullshit."
Poker Face is a 2023 mystery dramedy series created by Rian Johnson starring Natasha Lyonne. The first season premiered on Peacock on January 26, 2023. The series was renewed for a second season on February 15, 2023.
Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a woman with an innate ability to identify lies. After getting on the wrong side of some powerful people, Cale winds up on the run, fleeing from one small town to the next with only the clothes on her back and her well-used Plymouth Barracuda, taking any odd jobs she can find. Along the way, Cale's quirky ability and innate sense of justice lead her to get involved with bizarre murder mysteries that only she can solve.
The series is a deliberate effort by Johnson to bring back the classic TV mystery series like Murder, She Wrote and Columbo, and employs the old Mystery of the Week and Reverse Whodunnit formats, making it something of a companion piece to Johnson's Benoit Blanc whodunnit movies (the latter of which even features Natasha Lyonne in a cameo as herself).
Has nothing to do with the Lady Gaga song.
Poker Face includes the following trope examples:
- Absence of Evidence: A double dose of this occurs in "The Stall".
- Charlie sniffs George Boyle's beer bottle hoping to get the scent of poison or sleeping pills and smells neither. In fact, she doesn't smell anything at all because Taffy Boyle washed out the bottle to hide evidence of the Ambien he slipped into it.
- Charlie notices that the recording of Taffy's radio show didn't have a train noise in the background as usual because Taffy had muted the background audio so no one would hear him sneaking out of the booth and then back in. Probably an homage to a similar reveal in the Columbo episode "The Most Crucial Game".
- Actually Pretty Funny: Cliff openly laughs when he and Sterling Jr. find out that Charlie tricked Sterling Jr. into ruining the reputation of the casino. He stops laughing when Sterling Jr. is so distraught he walks off the balcony.
- All for Nothing: All the plans Charlie foils kinda fall under this, but there are some notable examples:
- In "The Night Shift", after Jed is caught, he burns the lottery ticket he killed Damian over as the police roll up to arrest him.
- In "Rest in Metal", the band kills their drummer Gavin in order to get the rights to the song he wrote, which they are certain will be a hit (their previous drummer got rich off of a song she wrote, but they got nothing.) It later turns out that Gavin copied the theme song from Benson, which is already under copyright and cannot be used for their new song.
- Ambiguous Situation: In "Rest in Metal", it's unclear what will happen to the band as a result of the podcast. The podcast might not have an audience that overlaps with the band's fan base. It's also unclear if they have the resources to fight their way out of the predicament or how this commercially will affect them.
- And the Adventure Continues: The first season ends with Charlie once again on the run, this time from Beatrix Hasp and the Five Families.
- Artistic License – Sports: Despite what the announcer says, the cars at Peach Tree Speedway in "Future of the Sport" are not late models, they're closer to street stocks, which look nothing like late models
. - Asshole Victim: Most of the series has killers bump off good people, but since this is a murder mystery series, there are of course some scumbags in the midst.
- Jerry Hill from "Dead Man's Hand" was murdered to be the patsy in his wife Natalie's murder, but seeing as he was a drunk and abusive towards Natalie... well, Charlie focuses more on her murder than his.
- "Morty" from "Escape from Shit Mountain". A drifter and thief who saw the murder of an innocent skier as either a free cash reward instead of a human being, and then later used that murder as blackmail for a very expensive car. When the murderer decides to just get rid of her too, you can't deny she didn't have it coming.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- "The Stall" begins with George in tears saying he's a murderer. So he's the murderer of the episode, right? Wrong. He just watched Okja and is horrified about how many animals he's killed while running his barbecue. Instead it's George's brother Taffy who's the murderer, murdering George so that the barbecue won't be shut down.
- "Exit, Stage Death" has the audience believing either Michael or Kathleen are going to kill the other thanks to their huge hate for each other. It turns out the pair are working together to kill Michael's wife, Ava, for the money.
- "The Future of the Sport" seems to show Keith sabotaging rival Davis' car to crash in a race. It's then revealed Davis discovered what happened and tricked Keith's daughter Katy into driving the car instead. Keith, crushed by guilt, confesses what he's done, and the rest of the episode revolves around trying to prove Davis set Katy up.
- "Escape from Shit Mountain" has a woman get hit by Trey, who puts her in the trunk and drives her to a motel to bury her in a hole. She crawls out and bangs on the door, just as Charlie's car pulls up. We don't find out until later in the episode that this woman is Charlie herself, and the one driving up is a drifter who took her car.
- "The Hook" functions as this both in itself and for the entire first season. Cliff finally catches Charlie and brings her to Frost, who makes her an offer to work for him. Naturally, Charlie is suspicious, and when Frost is murdered, it looks like this was may have been some sort of elaborate revenge plan to kill himself and frame Charlie. But we later find out that Frost really did want Charlie to work for him, and it was Cliff who murdered him on behalf of the Hasps.
- Blackmail Backfire:
- Narrowly averted in "Exit Stage Death." After discovering Michael and Kathleen's murder plot, their co-star, Rebecca, demands blackmail money. Michael suggests paying her off, but Kathleen decides to use her dog's peanut butter treats to trigger Rebecca's deathly peanut allergy, which would have worked were it not for Charlie's timely intervention.
- Played straight in "Escape from Shit Mountain", when after Morty tries to take Trey's fancy car by blackmailing him over having murdered Chloe Jones, he just bumps her off in it and rolls the car over a cliff.
- Bland-Name Product: "The Orpheus Syndrome" revolves around a special effects studio called Lights And Magic, which is pretty overtly modeled on the real-life studio Industrial Light & Magic.
- Book Ends: Episode 10 ends the same way the pilot does. Charlie smashing her phone on the side of the road and driving off in her Barracuda to escape gangsters out for her blood.
- Borrowed Catchphrase:
- In "The Night Shift", Jed says "Bullshit" to Charlie when the latter lies about Sara saying Damian accompanied Jed on the roof to trick a confession out of him.
- In "The Future of the Sport", Keith's wife Donna is the one to call "Bullshit" when he lies about having tampered with Davis McDowell's car.
- Brick Joke:
- In "Rest in Metal," when asked where she found their idiotic drummer, Ruby cracks "Julliard" before revealing just off an internet ad. Later, in a talk with Charlie, Gavin reveals he did indeed attend Julliard.
- Early in "Rest in Metal", Gavin is shown on his tour bus watching reruns of Benson. Later, just as the band is about to get rich off his song, they learn via an Internet video that Gavin just copied the Benson theme for the tune, which none of them realized.
- Casting Gag:
- S. Epatha Merkerson, who portrayed Lieutenant Anita Van Buren in the original Law & Order series for seventeen seasons, appears on this show as a murderous anti-establishment hippie who despises the police. Same goes for Judith Light, playing her partner in crime, who portrayed a lawyer and a judge in multiple seasons on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
- From the same episode, K Callan appears as an elderly woman who is murdered. She previously played in another Rian Johnson project as Great Nana Thrombey.
- In the first season, Charlie is on the run from a crime boss played by Ron Perlman. The final episode sets up that Charlie will spend the next season on the run from a crime boss played by Rhea Perlman. No relation.
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt had previously played a teenaged Hardboiled Detective solving a murder in Rian Johnson's 2005 high school-set Film Noir Brick. In "Escape from Shit Mountain", he plays the other side of the proverbial mystery genre-coin as the murderer.
- Catchphrase: Charlie often says "bullshit" when she notices a person lie.
- Caught on Tape:
- In their confrontation in the pilot, Sterling Jr. mocks Charlie on thinking she could tape him confessing to a murder. Charlie responds she's not recording him now...but she was before on his plans to fleece a high roller. She already sent the recording to said high roller, who has not only already left but will put the word out to all the other high rollers.
- In "The Night Shift", Jed manipulates the security camera footage to make it look like someone else committed the murder. Charlie then starts looking for footage from other security cameras that might show what really happened. A truck's dashboard camera reveals what happened and is enough for the cops to arrest Jed.
- In "The Stall," Charlie tricks a confession from one killer by having the local DJ (who can impersonate almost anyone) call her up, posing as her accomplice and getting her confession, which he then plays on the air.
- In "The Hook", Sterling Sr. reveals that he had taped just about everything that happened in his casino and hotel, including a recording of Sterling Jr. conspiring with Sr.'s nemesis, Beatrix Hasp, tipping him off that his son had betrayed him. Agent Clark listens to more of the tapes and finds enough to arrest Cliff for murdering Nathalie and Jerry back in the first episode.
- Chronic Hero Syndrome: Due to befriending a variety of people at places she drifts by, Charlie can't not help them when they end up either dead or framed.
- Confess to a Lesser Crime: Perps can throw off Charlie by straightforwardly admitting to lesser crimes, since that won't set off her internal lie detector. For example, when she confronts Ruby about their hit song being actually written by Gavin, Ruby doesn't even try to deny it, leaving Charlie with little way to tell if Ruby killed Gavin for the rights.
- Contrived Coincidence: This occurs in almost every episode after the pilot. While laying low, Charlie takes several jobs, often working for the suspects. Seemingly everywhere she goes, someone is being murdered.
- Cool Car: Charlie's Plymouth Barracuda, while it's seen better days, is still a damn fine car.
- Cool Old Lady: Joyce and Irene in "Time of the Monkey" are cool, anti-establishment hippies from the '70s, who reminisce with Charlie about their lives as activists before they went to jail. Charlie is shocked when she discovers that their anti-establishment work was not peaceful flower protests, but instead domestic terrorism and they were arrested while planning to bomb a school. When she confronts them they turn on her, too.
- Cutting Corners:
- In "Time of the Monkey", a junior FBI agent is assigned to Witness Protection where he watches over an elderly man who testified as a government witness 50 years ago. He is bored by the assignment and does not ask any questions when the witness requests to move into a retirement home. He approves the request without first doing the required background checks on staff and residents of the retirement home. A few days later later the witness is dead.
- In "Exit Stage Death", the killers get lazy and create their alibi based on a script from an episode of a TV show they once starred in. The next day, they are blackmailed by a witness who recognized the dialog from that episode.
- Dead Star Walking: Adrien Brody features prominently in the advertising - only for his character, Sterling Jr., to commit suicide in the first episode.
- Driven to Suicide:
- In "Dead Man's Hand", upon realizing that Charlie has tricked him into ruining the reputation of the casino, Sterling Jr. throws himself off a balcony.
- In "The Orpheus Syndrome", Laura's crime being exposed at the LAM gala, along with her guilt from having murdered Arthur and Max for it, causes her to have a mental breakdown that ends with her leaping off the building to her death.
- Engineered Public Confession: In "Exit Stage Death," Charlie plants a microphone in Kathleen's dressing room, wiring her and Michael's plans for murder right back to the cop in the audience.
- Entitled to Have You: In "The Night Shift", Jed seems to have this attitude about his crush Sara, taking her flirtatious friendship with Damian as a personal injustice. When Damian confronts Jed about his behaviour, Jed insists that it was him and his family who first welcomed Sara and her family when they moved into town and that Damian wasn't even living there yet, as if that gives him "dibs" on her. When he realizes she's not interested in him, he starts making misogynistic Slut-Shaming jokes at her expense.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
- Sterling Sr. is a shady man, and has been emotionally abusive to his son for years. But deep down, he does care for Sterling Jr. When he finds out that Charlie caused him to commit suicide, he makes sure to have her hunted down so that he can torture and kill her out of vengeance - though by the time of "The Hook" he has realized that this wasn't really Charlie's fault, and decides not to kill her after all.
- Keith Owens is willing to sabotage a young man's racecar in order to kill him, but he's devastated when it turns out his daughter ended up driving the car in his place, sending her into a coma. He's so guilt-stricken that he publicly confesses what he's done before Charlie even has a chance to solve the mystery.
- Evil Is Petty: When discussing her abilities with Sterling, Jr., Charlie points out that people don't just lie about big things, they lie all the time about the most pointless, banal things. This is why her ability is not as useful as it first seems, since she sees people lying all day every day with no way of telling which lies are important.
- Evil Versus Evil: "The Future of the Sport" features the rivalry between Keith Owens and Davis McDowell. The former is willing to sabotage Davis' racecar in order to cause a fatal accident, and when the latter catches it, he's willing to disable the seatbelts and lure Keith's racer daughter into the car to die in his place.
- Exact Words: Charlie can only tell when somebody is lying, and can be thrown off by misunderstandings and wordplay.
- Failed a Spot Check: The FBI agent in "Time Of the Monkey" neglected to check on why Gabriel insisted on going to a specific nursing home, and missed that it's because the accomplices he sold out decades ago were living there.
- A Family Affair: In "The Stall", Taffy is having an affair with his sister-in-law, and the two even conspire to Murder the Hypotenuse.
- Foreshadowing:
- In "Dead Man's Hand," Charlie tries (unsuccessfully) to trick the facial recognition on Natalie's tablet using a photograph. In "The Orpheus Syndrome," Laura uses a far more elaborate version of that trick to get into Max's laptop.
- In the same episode, Natalie and Charlie are in Charlie's trailer, watching the ending diner scene Pulp Fiction. The scene (in the show) ends on Jules (in the movie) saying he will "walk the earth". Charlie ends up driving across the U.S. while helping people and keeping ahead of Sterling Sr. over the course of the season.
- In the first episode, Sterling Jr. mentions that Charlie once managed to win an entire gambling tournament in Denver, which would later lead to her ability being discovered by Sterling Sr. In the ninth episode, Charlie is nearly killed in the same city.
- While forced to listen to right-wing radio by an aggressive dog, Charlie reflexively calls bullshit on the pundit's words. Proving that the radio host doesn't believe anything he's saying, and is actually a bored radio jockey doing impressions all day.
- The fact that Gavin composed his "hit" metal ballad by copying the theme from Benson is foreshadowed not just by him being glimpsed watching the show, but also by the habit of picking up things from everywhere else to create the song's lyrics.
- In "Dead Man's Hand," Charlie tries (unsuccessfully) to trick the facial recognition on Natalie's tablet using a photograph. In "The Orpheus Syndrome," Laura uses a far more elaborate version of that trick to get into Max's laptop.
- Formula-Breaking Episode:
- "The Future of the Sport" starts like the rest of the episodes, setting up a murder and murderer - but by the midpoint we learn neither of them was who we thought they were. We see Keith Owens sabotage hated rival Davis McDowell's racecar and then the car crash... only to see that Davis saw Keith doing it, take additional care to so the seatbelt would fail, and make sure that Keith's daughter Katy was behind the wheel when it crashed, forcing Keith to retire from the sport with his reputation destroyed. Even more so when the daughter survives, meaning no-one dies in the episode.
- "Escape from Shit Mountain" is relatively more straightforward, where we see the killer of the episode and the events that lead to the Murder Of The Week, and the first act ends with what appears to be Charlie stumbling onto the scene - until the second act starts, and reveals that the victim in the first act was none other than Charlie herself, who survives the hit-and-run, and the exact nature of what the Murder Of The Week is isn't brought into focus until further in when a seeming background element (a missing snowboarder by the name of Chloe Jones) is put into the forefront. The episode itself leans more into suspense than mystery, thanks to Charlie's condition for most of it.
- "The Hook" inverts the series formula; the episode starts by viewing the events leading up to the murder from Charlie's perspective, after which it switches to the perspective of the killer.
- Friend on the Force: In "The Hook", Agent Clark - the junior FBI guy who had played a more minor role in "The Time Of The Monkey" - returns, grateful for all the help Charlie gave his career.
- Fugitive Arc: Charlie spends the series on the run from Sterling Sr., finding mysteries along the way.
- Genius Ditz: Charlie. She's extremely scatterbrained and bad at reading most social cues, causing a lot of people to write her off as an idiot, but once there's a mystery to be solved, she is extremely good at spotting the things that don't add up, even beyond her Living Lie Detector abilities, and piecing together what they mean.
- Genre Throwback: To Mystery of the Week and Walking the Earth shows from The '70s and '80s such as Columbo (from which it borrows the Reverse Whodunnit format) and The Incredible Hulk (1977).
- Greater-Scope Villain: Beatrix Hasp and the Five Families, as of "The Hook."
- Hate Sink: While none of the show's killers are painted in a sympathetic light, there are some utterly detestable standouts:
- "The Night Shift" has Jed, a car mechanic creeper who doesn't process that the gas station girl isn't into him, and kills someone for a 25K lottery ticket. He has no social skills, and disparages the man he killed (a vet) by saying the guy just did paperwork (true, but still).
- "Escape from Shit Mountain" has Trey, a privileged finance bro who murdered his high school girlfriend and has up to now gotten away with it. On house arrest for insider trading, he almost kills Charlie joyriding in his car when there's a brief shutdown in the system, disabling his ankle bracelet. He takes her to his friend's motel to bury her in the same spot as the missing girl. Over the night, he kills his friend, kills a woman who found out about the missing girl and was blackmailing him, and almost kills Charlie yet again (on purpose). He has no remorse about anything he does.
- Have You Told Anyone Else?: Done in "Time of the Monkey" as Charlie outlines how the killers did it and they're going to jail as soon as she tells the FBI. One openly goes "so you haven't told anyone yet" and Charlie has a brief Oh, Crap! moment before the two attack her.
- Here We Go Again!: In the first season finale, Charlie is finally free from Sterling and Cliff, only to find herself on the road once more fleeing the wrath of the Five Families for her role in exposing their murder of Sterling.
- Historical In-Joke: When the band in "Rest In Metal" are modifying an amp as part of a Death Trap, Link Wray's "Rumble" plays in the background. Wray had to heavily modify his own amp to get the ragged guitar sound on that track, essentially inventing guitar distortion in the process.
- In Medias Res: The episodes usually begin with the murder of the week before rewinding to see Charlie coming in and interacting with the killer and victim.
- Ironic Echo: Charlie has a small habit of re-iterating stuff people told her.
- Large Ham Radio: Fed up with the local guy on the radio going on right-wing conspiracy rants, Charlie goes to confront him at the station, only to find it's a young black man. It turns out the guy is pretty much every "radio personality" for the small town, from the Dumb Ass DJ to the late-night jazz host to a female knitting circle hostess.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Charlie isn't a cop and can't arrest any of the murderers but she can destroy their livelihoods, reputations, and potentially put the real cops on their trail.
- Leitmotif:
- Each episode has a cheery banjo tune (aptly named “Charlie’s Theme”) that plays when we're about to see how Charlie factors into whatever crime we just saw take place.
- Similarly, we have “On The Lam,” a more suspenseful banjo theme that usually adorns each episode’s murder plot.
- Living Lie Detector: Charlie can spot when someone is lying, without fail.
- Logical Weakness: Charlie's powers only detect lies, not objective facts, so if someone really believes something to be the truth she won't detect a lie. Sometimes, this helps her suss out that something isn't right ("The Night Shift"), but it can also blind her to when things are worse than the person saying it makes them seem ("Time of the Monkey"). This also means that she can fall for Exact Words from someone telling the truth, but hiding the exact details ("The Future of the Sport").
- Make It Look Like an Accident: How the band in "Rest in Metal" get rid of their drummer, setting him up to be electrocuted in the middle of a song.
- Keith Owens sabotages rival Davis McDowell's car with a device that will cause his engine's throttle linkage to stay engaged and force him to drive into the wall at full speed. McDowell sees him install it and decides to punish him by tricking Owens' daughter into driving his car.
- Murder Is the Best Solution:
- Sterling, Jr. orders Cliff to kill Natalie and Jerry as soon as Natalie discovers the hidden secret on the high roller's laptop. Cliff tries to get him to call his father first instead of flying off the handle, but Sterling shuts him down.
- Jed shoves Damian, who had a growing bond with the girl that Jed was obsessed with, off the roof as soon as Damian realized that he won the lottery.
- Taffy admittedly does try to talk to his brother George before resorting to murder, but once he sees that he cannot persuade George to stay in business together he stages his suicide.
- Once Doxxxology realizes that Gavin's song is almost guaranteed to be a hit, and remembering that the last time their drummer wrote a hit song she left the band to live off the royalties, they decide as a group to kill him and claim the song as their own.
- Irene and Joyce kill Gabriel for his betrayal, and then kill Betty as a witness and try to kill Charlie as well to continue the coverup.
- Trey ("Escape from Shit Mountain") does a little congratulatory dance in his hallway after killing three people (actually two, he doesn't know Charlie survived) to cover up a fourth murder he committed years ago.
- Name of Cain: Kazimir Caine, an oil-rich gambler whose awful secret launches the plot. He's a very bad guy.
- Never My Fault: In "Night Shift", Jed very much has this attitude. When Charlie asks what's been keeping him in his boring, insular life when he's clearly pretty smart, he blames it on bad timing and having "missed my chance" instead of his own laziness and lack of ambition. Even after his uncle realizes that Jed sabotaged Charlie's car, this is somehow not his fault.
- Never Suicide:
- Cliff kills Natalie and her abusive husband Jerry, then plants the gun in Jerry's hand to make it look like a murder-suicide at the hands of a domestic abuser.
- Taffy drugs his brother George, then pipes the fumes from a smoker into his trailer and rigs the doors to lock from the inside to make it look like he committed suicide.
- Played With in "The Orpheus Syndrome": Max knows he's been fatally poisoned, but in order to stop Laura from using his corpse to unlock his laptop, he dives off her balcony before the poison can kill him.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Arthur Liptin, the legendary Stop Motion visual effects artist who is working on a "non-narrative" feature in "The Orpheus Syndrome", is quite reminiscent of Phil Tippett, whose Mad God came out the previous year. Tippett Studio provided props and samples of animation for the episode, including a few repurposed models from Mad God.
- Noodle Incident: Charlie's tense conversation with her sister Emily before she sneaks out of the house again implies that Charlie did something to alienate the two (involving her ability to sense lies and their father) but the shows doesn't elaborate
- Nothing Is Scarier: The contents of the laptop that lead to Natalie's murder are never revealed. Everybody's reactions to it are enough to reveal that whatever it is, it's bad.
- Off the Grid: Charlie is trying to stay off the grid to avoid Cliff, since she realizes that any time she uses her credit card or gives any sign of where she is, he'll be there within four hours. In "The Night Shift", she befriends a truck driver named Marge, who is also living off the grid to protect her side hustle smuggling prescription drugs in from Canada, and gives her some pointers on how to keep a low profile and be as self-sufficient as possible.
- Oh, Crap!: Charlie gets this a lot, especially in the pilot when she sees Sterling Jr. kill himself.
- Old People are Nonsexual: Averted in "Time of the Monkey". There are several men at the nursing home who have a reputation of being lecherous and promiscuous, while Joyce and Irene are pretty open about their sexual experiences of decades past.
- Once More, with Clarity:
- Happens Once an Episode because of the format. Each episode starts with the murder Charlie will be solving, then doubles back explaining how Charlie fits into the picture. We often see more details on earlier events through her POV.
- In "Time of the Monkey", we see a flashback to the day when Irene and Joyce were arrested while preparing flowers for an anti-establishment protest. We later see what actually happened that day. They were building bombs so they could blow up a high school.
- One-Hit Wonder: In-universe. "Rest in Metal" focuses on the aged members of a band who had one major hit song, but as the long-retired drummer wrote it, she's the one who gets all the royalties while the rest are stuck working gigs in seedy bars. When their seemingly idiotic new drummer reveals a song they all recognize can be a new hit for them, it drives them to murder him and claim the song as their own.
- Pædo Hunt: While never outright stated, it's heavily implied that what was on Kazimir Caine's laptop was child porn. There's talk of Russian child porn rings earlier on in the episode. One picture of the laptop screen is enough that everyone who sees it talks about involving the FBI. Later on in the episode, Charlie calls it "sick shit".
- Police Are Useless: Charlie usually starts investigating a case after the police have already ruled it either accidental or suicide or settled on the wrong suspect.
- Subverted in "The Hook", where Agent Clark is able to piece together the information Charlie pointed him towards and arrest Cliff, clearing Charlie of the murder she was framed for.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: The plot of "Rest in Metal" could have been avoided had the band just realized Gavin's "surefire hit song" was simply reworking the theme from Benson.
- Power Incontinence: Charlie has no conscious control over her ability to detect lies, and since people lie constantly throughout their normal daily lives she is constantly bombarded with the knowledge that the people around her are lying. Since she can't tell why they are lying or what they are lying about, only that they are lying, she finds it more frustrating than useful.
- Punk in the Trunk:
- In "Rest in Metal", Cliff tells Charlie she can ride in the passenger seat or the trunk.
- In "The Hook", he repeats his offer. Cue Gilligan Cut to Cliff driving, with an empty passenger seat, before we hear thumping noises from the trunk and Charlie informing him that she's reconsidered her decision. She rides up front the rest of the way.
- Race Against the Clock:
- In "The Night Shift", Charlie gets money out of the ATM and figures she has four hours before it's tracked and someone starts hunting her location. She's ready to leave town immediately, only to get pulled into a murder case, so she is constantly checking her watch. She manages to solve it just before the time runs out, and Cliff shows up in the town almost exactly when she predicted.
- The four hour time limit receives a Call-Back in "Rest in Metal".Charlie: When did [that viral video of me] go online?
Fake Narc: About four hours ago.
Cliff: (appearing out of nowhere) Hello, Charlie.
- Recorded Audio Alibi: In the episode "The Stall", Taffy and Mandy's plan to stage George's suicide involves Taffy pre-recording a long-winded diatribe about hot links, which buys him enough time to do the deed.
- Retro Universe: A common feature of Rian Johnson projects. The show has a deliberate mix of modern technology and social media alongside a strong 1970s fashion sense and art design, even to the show's intro titles. It's like time moved on except in aesthetics.
- Justified in the episode "Time of the Monkey", which revolves around two former left-wing extremists who were arrested in the 1970s for planning to blow up a Model UN and seem to have kept the aesthetic and attitude once they got out after being in prison for several decades.
- Reverse Whodunnit: Each episode usually begins with the murder and the plot from there usually involves Charlie piecing together the crime.
- Shout-Out:
- In "Dead Man's Hand", one of the casino's slot machines can be heard playing "This Old Man", the unofficial theme song of the show's biggest inspirations.
- In "Time of the Monkey", there are three elderly murder mystery-obsessed women with large amounts of knowledge on poisons. They're collectively called The Fletchers.
- Running Gag: In “The Night Shift,” Marge uses super glue to close Charlie’s gunshot wound and gifts her the bottle. Charlie repeatedly uses the same bottle of glue to stitch up her allies throughout the rest of the season. Ouch.
- Silly Simian: "The Time of the Monkey" is named for a scene at a zoo in which an orangutan, as a trick, is apparently able to tell what time it is (2:23). This is integral to solving the mystery, since the murder also happened at 2:23 - thus making 2:23 the "time of the monkey" - but it's also just a funny scene and a funny name for an episode.
- Sinister Southwest: The first three episodes are revolve around murder and corruption at a Nevada casino, a New Mexico roadside town, and a Texas barbecue restaurant, respectively.
- Slipping a Mickey:
- In "The Stall", Taffy gives George a beer laced with sleeping pills in order to have him unconscious for the murder.
- In "Escape from Shit Mountain", Jimmy gives what he says are Ibuprofen to a badly-injured Charlie, but she can tell he's lying, and only pretends to take them and pass out, spitting the pills back into the cup as soon as he leaves the room. Later, Trey accidentally drinks from the same cup and becomes woozy, although he's still able to drive home.
- Small Town Boredom: "The Night Shift" revolves around three young people in a dead-end New Mexico town. Sara wants to get out, but doesn't have the resources. Jed says he wants out, but lacks the ambition to step outside his comfort zone. Damian, the most recent arrival, doesn't love the place but is trying to make the most of it.
- Speaking Like Totally Teen: In "Rest In Metal", a character played by John Hodgman keeps showing up at concerts using extremely stilted drug lingo ("Have you seen my friend Molly?"), sounding so inauthentic that everyone, Charlie included, assumes he's an undercover cop. When she has gathered a sizable amount of evidence regarding that episode's murder, she takes it to him, hoping he can arrest the killers, but it turns out he's not a cop after all. He's just incredibly bad at buying drugs.
- Spotting the Thread:
- Natalie and Jerry's death is staged as a murder-suicide, but Charlie remembers that Cliff had confiscated Jerry's gun the day before when he showed up at the casino drunk.
- Seeing the thick rubber-soled shoes that Doxxxology was wearing during the show when Gavin was electrocuted is what clues her in on them all being complicit in his death.
- Stealing the Credit: Doxxxology's whole reason for murdering Gavin was to claim the credit for the song he had written.
- Stern Chase: Cliff is a hitman working for Sterling Senior, a powerful casino owner and mob boss. He's hunting Charlie down and she is on the run from him.
- Stolen Credit Backfire: Doxxxology claimed to have written the song that they killed Gavin for, unaware that he had copied the tune to the theme song to Benson.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Magically being able to tell when anyone is lying sounds like an awesome, crime-solving superpower, and it's undeniably quite useful for Charlie. But it's not a "Solve the case" button Charlie can just push whenever she wants. Careful, circumspect criminals can use Exact Words to stymie Charlie's gift (she can only detect outright lies), knowing that someone is lying is not the same thing as knowing why someone is lying, she has to complement her bullshit detector with actual detective work and evidence (no one is going to buy that some random woman no one has ever met has an actual, factual superpower), and, of course, it's not going to protect her from physical violence if the suspect is alone with her.
- Take Our Word for It:
- We never see what was on Casimir Caine's laptop that was so horrifying - all we see is people's reactions to it, and no one ever explicitly says what it was, although the implication is that it's child pornography.
- Likewise, the first time Gavin plays "Sucker Punch", all the audio cuts out and we simply see Ruby's stunned face as she realizes what this song could mean for the band.
- Title Drop: Once an Episode - the name of the episode comes from some line spoken within it.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
- In Episode 3, "The Stall", Charlie shows the movie Okja to her new friend George. The movie causes George to become a fervent vegan and immediately quit the barbecue business, leading his brother and wife to kill him for his stake in the company.
- Happens again in episode 4, "Rest in Metal", when Charlie convinces Ruby not to be so hard on the newly hired Gavin. This leads Ruby to let Gavin stay at the band's motel room for the night, and for Gavin to show the band a song he wrote. Convinced that the song will be a hit, the band plots to kill Gavin so that they can take the song for themselves.
- And again in episode 8, "The Orpheus Syndrome", where Charlie inspires Arthur to confront his past so he can let go of his guilt, resulting in him taking the reels of the incident from his former studio's archives - including the incriminating footage of what actually happened to Lily, and what Laura had killed Max for. This results in Laura killing Arthur as well after he had come to her house to confront her about it.
- "Escape from Shit Mountain," for once, has someone other than Charlie be the instigator. If Morty hadn't abandoned Charlie in her car by the side of the road, Charlie wouldn't have been in the position to get hit by Trey's car, and the events of the entire episode (including Morty's own death) wouldn't have happened.
- Verbal Tic: Charlie's Catchphrase of "bullshit" is an unconscious tic that happens every time she hears someone lie in front of her.
- Villainous Breakdown: Laura in "The Orpheus Syndrome." She's clearly coming apart at the seams from guilt at the LAM gala, stumbling through her speech before evidence of her crime is put on display. After that, she starts hallucinating and eventually leaps to her death.
- Walking the Earth: Charlie is on the run and in a new town in every episode. The trope is subtly lampshaded when, around realizing she will have to live on the run for a while, Charlie is seen watching Pulp Fiction - specifically, the scene where Jules and Vincent discuss "walking the earth like Kane from Kung Fu".
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: The plot is kicked off because Sterling Jr. wants to prove to his father that he has the brains and guts to run the family casino just as well as his father did.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: In "Escape from Shit Mountain", Charlie has a short-lived romance with a handsome shirtless man in rural Colorado. They're together for a few months, but by winter she's alone again. We never find out how their relationship ended or what happened to the guy.
- You Can Always Tell a Liar: Subverted. Charlie is preternaturally gifted when it comes to sussing out lies, but she says in the first episode that it's not something as simple as watching for tells - she just knows.
