'Poker Face' Fans Blame Natasha Lyonne's A.I. Company For The Show's Demise

A throwback to the days when people used to watch TV through a haze of cigarette smoke in a shag carpeted room, the Rian Johnson-created Poker Face featured episodic murder mysteries, celebrity guest stars and a font that hasn’t been seen since the days of Columbo and The Rockford Files.

The show starred Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a casino-worker-turned-drifter with a borderline supernatural ability to detect if someone is lying or telling the truth. And she also had a knack for randomly happening upon grisly crimes wherever she went, à la Jessica Fletcher. 

This week, Peacock, the NBCUniversal streaming service that somehow still exists, canceled Poker Face, which wrapped up its second season earlier this year. According to Deadline, Johnson is now attempting to “shop the show to other broadcasters for a two-season commitment.” But, weirdly, the version of Poker Face he’s pitching will star Peter Dinklage, not Lyonne. 

Odder still, the Game of Thrones star won’t be playing a new detective character, he’ll be stepping into the role of Charlie, despite being a 56-year-old dude and not a 46-year-old woman with an incredibly idiosyncratic speaking voice. 

Johnson and Lyonne, who will remain an executive producer despite exiting the part, issued a statement suggesting that giving their lead character the Doctor Who treatment was a totally normal thing to do. 

“We’ve been germinating this next move together since writing the season two finale,” it reads. “We love our Poker Face and this is the perfect way to keep it rolling. Give us a beat and we may just see Charlie Cale again down that open highway.” 

Deadline also noted that Johnson wants “the franchise to evolve with a new actor to play the lead character every two years,” like some kind of TV detective time share. 

The news came as a big shock to fans, especially because Poker Face was seemingly a response to Lyonne’s longtime desire to play Lt. Columbo. Since fans still don't have a clear explanation for the baffling casting shake-up, a number of people on social media began to theorize that Lyonne’s association with AI technology may have burnt her bridges with the show’s creatives. 

Lyonne is the co-founder of Asteria, an AI production studio that purports to be an “artist-led, ethical AI film and animation studio.” She is reportedly working on her feature directorial debut, “Uncanny Valley,” which will include AI-generated sequences built by an “AI model called ‘Marey’ that is built on data that has been copyright cleared” (although other tech companies have claimed that “it is impossible to create a generative-AI model without scraping the internet”).

In response to the backlash over her movie announcement, Lyonne claimed that she was “not going to omit any department heads or production designers or cinematographers.” But despite that defense, the company is seemingly still predicated on a strategy of cutting costs by using AI to eliminate jobs. As Inc. Magazine reported, when the company was founded in 2022, they “set out to make animated films with zero human hands on deck.”

Lyonne also faced the wrath of the internet when she suggested that the late David Lynch had compared AI to a pencil during a private conversation. To be fair, Lynch did once call AI a “tool for creativity,” so her story was very likely true. But the fact that she was using a recently-deceased genius to defend her controversial business venture clearly rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

Is all of this AI love, coming so soon after the 2023 strikes, the real reason why Lyonne won’t be a part of Poker Face, pending its second life? We may never know, especially since Charlie Cale doesn’t actually exist.