Poker Face showrunner Tony Tost says Season 2 of his Peacock procedural dramedy will feature a nod to his long-canceled, but still beloved western series, Longmire.
Poker Face kicks off its second season on Peacock Thursday. Created by Rian Johnson, the show once again follows Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), a human lie detector with a heart of gold, who lives off the grid and drifts from town to town solving bizarre crimes.
The episode with the Longmire homage is called "The Taste of Human Blood" and finds Charlie in the midst of a Florida Panhandle cop convention.
Jacinto Taras Riddick, credited only as "Cowboy Sheriff," is the man wearing Longmire's signature brown jacket and cowboy hat and carrying a rifle.
This season's guest stars also include Richard Kind, Rhea Perlman, Kumail Nanjiani, Katie Holmes, Cynthia Erivo, Simon Helberg, Giancarlo Esposito, Melanie Lynskey, Justin Theroux and John Mulaney."I couldn't believe just the depth and range of guest stars that we got and it comes from different channels," Tost said.
"A lot of it comes just from people that Rian and Natasha know and who want to work with them and who like the show and who are basically like, 'Hey, if you would need me to come in for two weeks or just for a few days, I would love to come and just hang out.'"
"You'll think, 'Well, we can try, and then you end up getting them and it's really exciting," Tost said.
The writer-producer fell in love with the first season of the contemporary series, which feels like a throwback to popular private detective shows of the 1970s and '80s, and he was happy to take over as show-runner for the second run of episodes.
"I was excited about the opportunity to see what kind of old-school, mystery-of-the-week storytelling could look like in the modern day and to have such a great lead character/lead performer and to see what interesting situations, worlds, what kind of guest characters we could kind of surround around that," Tost explained.
"So, I kind of wanted to just come in and just build on the success of what i thought was a really strong first season."
Tost described Lyonne, also an executive producer on the show, as a "passionate" collaborator.
"It's a constant conversation. It's a constant discovery process," he added. "The last thing she wants to do is come in and just kind of phone in a performance or an episode. She wants to find what's alive on a moment-to-moment basis and I think that kind of ripples out."
Lyonne's grounded authenticity and sharp wit make her a natural to play the flawed, but instantly likable Charlie.
"She breathes real life and soulfulness and just spontaneity that I think is a really surprising element in what is a mystery-of-the-week format and, so, I think it's that combo that really works and that's very much her process," Tost said.
Also appealing are the crazy crimes Charlie finds herself investigating, frequently involving working- or middle-class people in rural parts of the United States.
"Oftentimes, we'll start with a sub-culture or a world or a character," Tost noted.
"We have a really great writers room and, so, the first [Season 2] episode was Cynthia Erivo. That was a branch out of Laura Deeley, who came in and, in essence, pitched a version of that story," he said, referring to what would become the episode, "The Game is a Foot," which casts Erivo as quintuplets resorting to murder over their dead mother's fortune.
In other instances, Johnson or the writers want to explore a specific niche, such as the world of minor league baseball in "Hometown Hero."
"You kind of brainstorm and I think Rian has an allergy of things going to the predictable or by rote," Tost said. "So, we will kind of go down a path and say: 'OK, that's kind of interesting, but what if, suddenly, there's an acid trip or what if, suddenly, we throw an alligator into a cop convention?'"
