What I learned about writing from watching Poker Face on Peacock
- Brandi Bradley
- Aug 21
- 6 min read
Every once and a while, I’ll be on the phone with my best friend and she’ll recommend a murder mystery for me to read. She’s a cozy reader. She likes locked rooms and smarty pants detectives. She loves Agatha Christie. And so do I. I just finished The Halloween Party and just watched A Haunting in Venice, and both versions of Death on the Nile. I also like Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware who have their own interpretations of the classic locked room mystery.
But what I am recognizing is many classic mystery whodunits and locked room mysteries (including ones like I’ve been writing about lately like Death and Other Details) revolve around the misadventures of the rich and the uber-wealthy.
I understand why the rich and the uber-wealthy make excellent mystery fodder.
The entitlement
The multiple suspects because of class systems and power structures,
The lavish estates which provides ample room for running, hiding, and disappearing.
However, as of late, I am less and less interested in the scheming and secrets of the wealthy. I’m looking for detectives and protagonists who are not geniuses or legends.
What I really wanted, needed and eventually now have, is the Peacock series, Poker Face.
Poker Face on Peacock is a detective series created by Rian Johnson, the writer of Knives Out and The Glass Onion, which features Charlie Cale, a woman who just knows when someone is lying to her. And that skill makes it possible for her to solve crimes which would often be swept under the rug or are staged to look like something inconsequential.
And what’s most appealing to me is that it’s mostly comprised of people who are just getting by. The former soldier who is making Subway sandwiches and filming inspirational TikTok videos, the box store employees, the educators at a small, private, faith-based school, the minor league baseball team. These are people who are doing their best to change their situation, and someone else can’t allow that to happen. It’s a show about people who make choices and live with those choices, much like Charlie Cale must do when she exposes a crime boss and as a result, has to live out of her car in order to survive.
It has a retro-vibe. More than once I have compared it to Rockford Files. It is a mystery where the viewer sees how it was committed and how it was covered up, like Columbo. And the detective is what we all feel like many of us in the crime writing/true crime/ citizen detectives thing we are – just someone who sees the world a little differently.
And the detective – Charlie Cale – is flawed. She day drinks, she smokes and vapes, she’s nosy, she’s brusque, she avoided higher education completely, and she has – as one person described– “a voice that sounds like a broken clarinet.” Above all things, Charlie has strong convictions, is empathetic to people’s situations, and she’s willing to do the jobs most people won’t. Where the villains are often somewhat sympathetic characters who justify their actions, in the end Charlie exposes them because no matter what, murder is always wrong.
What I learned about writing from watching Poker Face on Peacock:
Just let the character have a skill: often there is so much backstory to explain why a character is good at something or skilled at something. I understand why it’s important for a reader to understand why, but some things cannot be explained. Charlie Cale can tell when someone is lying to her with incredible accuracy. And when people ask about the how and the why, she just shrugs and says, “I don’t know. It’s just something I can do.” I don’t see it as a cop out, but it reminds me of what Benjamin Percy said in Thrill Me about backstory: that in addition to insulting the reader by cutting off their ability to speculate and fill in the blanks themselves, it also changes the momentum. “You have effectively yanked the gearshift into reverse. The story is no longer rushing forward – it’s sliding back.” (90)
Characters need their own mood music: This is definitely for writing audio/visual content, but I think this applies to purely text-based material as well. When the villains are on the screen, the tone of those scenes are directed toward their world, like how they see the world, which means the ambient music matches that world. And then when Charlie’s scenes come on, their world is being observed from her point of view. When the villains are in their world, they embody how much their values are driving their choices to lie, steal, or cheat, and then eventually kill. But when Charlie in on screen with her weird swaggery walk, she asks questions about how their world works and then you get their perspective through her perspective. On the show, her POV is accompanied by this gentle walking banjo. Accompanied by her shaggy haircut, it’s almost begging the viewer to see her as a real life Muppet in the middle of a road trip story but got derailed because someone they just met was murdered.
The road rambler device creates an interesting balance between “trouble follows her” and “now it’s just suspicious that you’re always around when someone dies.” : One of the jokes about Murder She Wrote is that Jessica Fletcher is the murderer because too many people die in Cabot Cove. Anyone who has watched the show steadily would note that Jessica is often traveling and meeting up with friends and associates all over the world. There are crimes in Cabot Cove, but they don’t all happen in the same place. The same issue occurs on Psych as well. Who could imagine Santa Barbara has so much crime? Charlie Cale on Poker Face is on the run, which means she is traveling from town to town, living in her car, and taking whatever jobs she can find. This means she is staying in shady neighborhoods and at times meeting shady people or shady-adjacent people, including con men, pick pockets, and revolutionary retirees. One time she even solves her own attempted murder after someone hits her with a car on a snowy, dark road. And one could say that her skill of telling when someone is lying is what makes her vulnerable to shady characters. But keeping her on the road makes it possible for her to engage in these crimes with less suspicion. And after it’s over, she can just move on.
As someone on the run, she’s been stripped of modern conveniences which adds to the retro vibe and creates more drama: When I wrote debut novel, Mothers of the Missing Mermaid, I realized quickly that my kidnapping story would fall apart in a modern era because now Amber Alerts exist. Which meant I had to set it in a different era. I never wanted to write historical fiction, but all of a sudden I am downloading vintage photos of the Emerald Coast to capture the 1970s in Destin, Florida. Charlie Cale doesn’t have a cell phone because the people who are chasing her are tracking her. By stripping Charlie of the convenience of an iPhone, she can’t just Google her way out of a problem and she can’t always call for help. In season 2, someone installs a C.B. radio in her vintage Barracuda, which now provides a way for her to make contact with others while she’s moving from place to place.
The best and most interesting mysteries are not about the powerful and the affluent, but people a lot like our neighbors. Which is what makes them interesting and engaging. A mystery where someone feels entitled to take the life of someone because they feel superior is almost boring in its simplicity. Rian Johnson’s stories – including Knives Out and The Glass Onion – have a lot to say about the class systems in America and people who are trying to make something of themselves their own way. What Poker Face does is show that you don’t need a lavish estate or an inheritance in order to tell that story.
If you need a little escapist whodunit, check out Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder at the brandibradley.com shop.
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