TV review: Poker Face, The Handmaid’s Tale and more

Poker Face Sky Showcase/Max

The Trial Channel 5

The Real Adolescence: Our Killer Kids Channel 5

Forever Netflix

The Handmaid’s Tale Channel 4

Poker Face (Sky Showcase/Sky Max), the Emmy-winning US comedy drama starring Natasha Lyonne as an amateur sleuth-cum-human lie detector, shouldn’t work. Returning for a second mystery-an-episode series, the show, created by Rian Johnson (Knives Out), takes “formulaic” to new heights. Sometimes you wonder if it’s testing how far it can push its luck with plot twists that barely bother, and crimes that are either quaint or farcical (spoiler alert: one episode features a drug-addled crocodile, like a scaly Cocaine Bear). Yet it makes me giggle – the sheer, slouchy, winking-at-the-viewer brio of it all.

Lyonne is the one-woman comedy monster truck who pulls the concept along. You simply can’t imagine anyone else in the role of Charlie, a postmodern Columbo with wild, red zigzagging hair and a voice like Liza Minnelli is lodged in her larynx. Charlie retains her talent for spotting liars (“Bullshit!”), maintains her knack for arriving in small towns across dust-bowl middle America in her 69 Plymouth Barracuda at the precise moment murderers are striking, and is still being pursued by Rhea Perlman’s mobster.

Poker Face teems with high-calibre guest stars. In this series opener, Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo powers through playing quintuplets in a tale of will beneficiaries and modern manners. Elsewhere, Giancarlo Esposito and Katie Holmes run a creepy funeral home, Melanie Lynskey plays a charity director tangled up with the underworld, and Awkwafina appears in a story about the corrupting allure of rent-controlled apartments. Even the voice that periodically comes over Charlie’s old-style CB radio belongs to Steve Buscemi.

At heart, Poker Face is about small-town morality and cowpoke justice: Scooby-Doo reborn for the streaming generation. Witty, goofy, self-aware, it makes two mistakes. At 12 episodes (I’ve watched 10), it stretches the sassy formula to snapping point. Moreover, this second series positions itself much more firmly in campy Only Murders in the Building territory. The intriguing whiff of human darkness in season one has gone, and, for all the larks, you miss it.

What an explosive talking point Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s Adolescence has become since it aired on Netflix in March, starkly highlighting not so much feral British youth (blades, rage, venal online influences) as the societal pressures that make them.

One-off drama The Trial (Channel 5), written by Mark Burt, initially promises to cover similar territory. It’s set in 2035, when parents can be held legally responsible for their children’s crimes, with poor parenting prowess also considered an offence.

The action takes place mainly in a deserted courtroom, with a small cast adding to the claustrophobic atmosphere and overreaching bureaucracy. Claire Skinner plays career woman and mother Dione, while Ben Miles is father, David, an annoying, between-jobs “landscape gardener”. Their daughter has committed a serious crime, so Dione and David face an inquisitor (Saoirse Monica-Jackson) who represents the state, cynically prying into the fissures of family dysfunction. The performances are good, and the themes interesting (parental responsibility, state interference), but over the course of an hour, The Trial comes across as a low-budget Black Mirror episode.

Teamed with it on Channel 5 is the documentary The Real Adolescence: Our Killer Kids, which details the tragic deaths of British youth arising from mainly spurious quarrels that escalate thanks to “zombie”-style knives (now classed as prohibited weapons in the UK). While the programme’s content is at times as uns ubtle as its title, the real-life cases of young people needlessly dying remain harrowing.

On Netflix there’s the new adaptation of American author Judy Blume’s 1975 YA novel Forever. For the uninitiated, Blume’s book endured over the decades as an unofficial teenage bible, a trailblazing fictionalised glossary of must-have information relating to sex, fledging relationships, heartbreak, humiliation and other thorny facets of young life.

These themes have been updated for this eight-part series (the showrunner is Mara Brock Akil; the director Regina King), and mostly it works well. The lovestruck teens, Justin (Michael Cooper Jr) and Keisha (Lovie Simone), are from black American families in Los Angeles (Justin’s parents are fabulously rich; Keisha’s single mother struggles to keep her at her elite school).

Forever also updates the minutiae of teenage lives, and for the most part doesn’t hesitate to “go there”. The opening dialogue is Justin shouting “Fuck!”; Keisha is shown dealing with the repercussions of being an unwitting participant in a sex tape; their tentative attempts to have sex are realistically clumsy. Nor are race issues ignored: the excitement of Justin’s first car is marred by the possibility of an encounter with the police.

At times, Forever feels too reminiscent of other hit teen shows: Euphoria, say, with added learning moments, or a raunchier Heartstopper (texts appear on screen). What keeps you watching is the naturalistic charm of Cooper Jr and Simone, who convince as star-crossed lovers gingerly navigating the landmines of youth.

The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4) has returned for its sixth and final series, with a defiant swish of its scarlet handmaid’s cloak – though there’s been a distinct lack of swishing of late. One of the big problems of recent series has been the near vanishing of the US turned Gilead – the woman-subjugating horror; the stirring iconography – leaving little but June (Elisabeth Moss), in jeans and an anorak, plotting to get her stolen daughter back.

Still, the last series was a return to form, and I’m motivated, in the Trump 2.0 climate, to rejoin June and her adversary Serena Joy (the icily magnificent Yvonne Strahovski) on a train taking them and their babies to safety in Alaska. Do things go awry over the first two episodes? You betcha. It remains baffling that The Handmaid’s Tale turned its back on Gilead’s unique wickedness to deliver a more ordinary flavour of dystopia. Still, it continues to be exciting enough to make me want to be there for the final push.

Octopus! (Prime Video)

Alerting the fan intersection of Fleabag and marine nature documentaries: Phoebe Waller-Bridge narrates/executive produces this charming docuseries (below) about octopuses and those who appreciate them. Octopus-lover Tracy Morgan (30 Rock) joins in the oceanic party.

VE Day 80: The Nation Pays Tribute (BBC One)

The stirring military parade that commenced the coverage of last week’s 80th anniversary of VE Day coverage, watched by veterans and royals including King Charles.

Horrible Science (CBBC)

The irreverent Horrible Histories team did a sterling job of teaching children about the past, and now they turn to science. There’s everything from magnetism, algae, dinosaurs and Isaac Newton on a rollercoaster.

Photographs Peacock TV, Netflix