ON TELEVISION THRILLS AND RED PILLS

“Poker Face” and Paul T: Goldman,” on Peacock.

- INKOO KANG

TV sleuths tend to come tortured ("True Detective") or brilliant bordering on clairvoyant ("Sherlock"). On Natasha Lyonne's series "Russian Doll," her character was closer to the former: a woman laden with familial tragedy trying to suss out why she keeps dying and then being resurrected on her thirty-sixth birthday. On her new show, "Poker Face" (Peacock), a murder-of-the-week series created by the film director Rian Johnson, she plays a human lie detector: her Spidey sense goes off when someone's not telling the truth. This premise is so silly that a different development process might have taken the project to CBS.

But Lyonne's smirkingly wise presence, combined with Johnson's fanciful yet humanistic approach to the mystery genre (most recently seen in "Knives Out" and its sequel, "Glass Onion"), renders their "Columbo" homage a hangout procedural. Each homicide is an excuse to spend some time with Lyonne's character, Charlie, a croakily sardonic, authority-allergic roamer who's less a detective than a righteous snoop.

It's noteworthy that an actor and a director with two of the most distinct sensibilities in Hollywood have come together to make the kind of syndication-friendly programming that you might have lost an afternoon to anytime in the past fifty years. (That timeless quality is reflected not just in the series well-worn format but in the pilot's temporally fluid aesthetic, which mixes mid-century kitsch, seventies-era scuzz, and modern-day alienation.) "Poker Face" is meant to be as comfortingly familiar as "Russian Doll" was novel and challenging. But the show still conjures as much charisma and surprise as it can inside its rather thoughtful formula. Each episode begins with a killing, then jumps around in time to reveal Charlie's connection to the crimes he tends to get close to people who end up dead and her efforts to bring the perpetrator to justice.