Here’s everything there is to know about Poker Face’s forthcoming Season 2, including its cast and potential release window.
Poker Face, which premiered in January 2023, stars Orange Is the New Black’s Natasha Lyonne. In the series, Lyonne plays a woman on the run who also happens to always know when someone is telling a lie.
The show proved so popular that Peacock renewed it for a second season less than a month after Season 1 debuted.
When Is Poker Face Season 2 Releasing?
Poker Face was a critically acclaimed success for Peacock, so fans wonder when its second season will drop. The answer, however, may not be satisfying to everybody.
Although Poker Face Season 2 has officially been ordered, it will likely not arrive soon.
Series creator Rian Johnson stated (via Deadline) that another sequel in his Knives Out film franchise has taken priority for him, leaving him with little time to develop more Poker Face:
“That’s something that’s really up in the air. I mean, a lot of it has to do with what happens in terms of the writers’ strike, and there’s so much that’s unknown at the moment. Also, right now my priority is getting the next Benoit Blanc movie going.”
Poker Face Season 1 was released a few months after Johnson’s Glass Onion came out. With that in mind, and factoring that Season 2 could be filmed while Knives Out 3 is in post-production, the new season of Poker Face could be eyeing a late 2025/early 2026 premiere.
Who’s Cast in Poker Face Season 2?
The only confirmed cast member for Poker Face Season 2 is series lead Natasha Lyonne. This is because the show is presented in an episodic, case-of-the-week format with a rotating cast of characters and actors.
But Lyonne herself (via Variety) has some specific names in mind that she’d love to see as guest stars, including Jodie Foster and Billie Eilish:
“It’s all cooking and it’s fucking hot. It’s gonna be a hot season. There’s some big ideas and I’ve been going around all of this award circuit with contracts and so I’ve been getting people to sign up for episodes. It’s been really helpful … Billie Eilish. I’ll try to get her to sign one later tonight. You know, I hear Jodie Foster is gonna be here tonight. So I’ll try to get a signature, some sort of a blood oath or you know, spitting in a palm and a handshake still holds in this town.”
What Will Happen in Poker Face Season 2?
Poker Face offers a fairly fresh spin on the standard murder mystery format. The series takes the “howcatchem” approach (also known as an inverted detective story) as opposed to the traditional “whodunnit” angle.
In other words, Poker Face draws inspiration from the iconic Columbo, and each episode’s central crime is shown being committed at the beginning. This leaves Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie to puzzle out the clues and solve the mystery.
So it’s likely that Season 2 will continue this storytelling structure.
When audiences last left Charlie Cale, her pursuers finally caught her, Sterling Frost Sr., and his henchman Cliff. Only, as it turned out, the real reason Frost Sr. was chasing Charlie was not so he could kill her but to offer her employment.
It was a swerve that some viewers saw as unsatisfying, especially considering that the show was set up to make audiences believe that Charlie’s life was constantly in peril.
Still, by season’s end, Charlie’s name was cleared, Frost Sr. was dead, and justice was brought to the killer of Charlie’s friend, Natalie. Things were looking up until Charlie received a call that would force her into service for a crime syndicate so they could make use of her talents as a human lie detector.
Instead of accepting, Charlie defiantly flees, and that’s where Season 2 of Poker Face should ultimately pick up, with Charlie again running for her life.
On the topic of Season 2, Natasha Lyonne and Rian Johnson spoke to Deadline about the direction the next batch of episodes could take. Lyonne remarked that she and Johnson have spent “a lot of time” discussing what will happen in Season 2:
“Rian and I did spend a lot of time talking about — and I don’t even know if we want to talk about it here because who knows if that’ll be the thing we ultimately want to commit to in a second season — but we did spend a lot of time just talking about a core injury or something, or when was the moment where Charlie decided this is a double-edged sword and this is also something that can make my life crumble, so I’ve got to sort of keep it, but put it aside.”
Johnson also felt that the second season would inevitably deal with Charlie’s father, but he doesn’t want to do it in such a way that resembles the generic “superhero origin story:”
“Something involving her father, and I think we will inevitably get into that. I feel like both of us were also wary of doing the equivalent of a superhero origin story where suddenly you do the flashback to the thing that’s the equivalent of being in the gamma-ray chamber, but emotionally.“
The producer is “willing to take the time” to fully realize a ”nuanced” version of the narrative they’re trying to convey:
“I guess for me, I’m willing to take the time to get to that, to figure out the version of it that’s nuanced enough and interesting enough. That’s the other tricky thing, figuring out a way to explore that in the context of a ‘Poker Face’ episode, I think. But anyway, it’s exciting to think about it.”
Poker Face Season 1 is streaming now, exclusively on Peacock.
