Our crime-solving heroine is utterly charming, it’s stuffed with A-list stars and some episodes are just great. If only the cases were a bit more cleverThis tribute to case-of-the week crime dramas is so nearly a brilliant TV show. Starring Natasha Lyonne (Orange Is the New Black, Russian Doll) as Charlie Cale, a woman with a foolproof ability to tell truth from falsehood, the series follows in the footsteps of classic story-of-the-week crime dramas; each episode features a tranche of excellent guest stars and a freshly covered-up misdeed for our thoroughly charming citizen-detective to uncover. With her gravelly-chipmunk New York tones – or “voice like a rusty clarinet”, as one character has it – Lyonne ensures Cale is an idiosyncratically charismatic protagonist you can really get behind. She’s cool: her catchphrase is “bullshit” and her aesthetic is 1970s-hued indie sleaze; shades, spray-on jeans, biker boots, shrunken T-shirts, wild, matted hair. She’s chaotically good, too: mischievous enough to bend the rules but essentially golden-hearted, in possession of an old-timey garrulousness and an inability to let things lie. What’s not to love?The mysteries themselves, mainly. Most episodes of Poker Face – which was created by Knives Out director Rian Johnson, although he is not a credited writer on this second season – involve a 10ish-minute Cale-free opening, during which the viewer bears witness to a crime, usually a murder. Afterwards, we discover how our hero came to be