Poker Face Cancelled at Peacock, but Rian Johnson Wants a New Charlie Cale

Poker Face, Rian Johnson’s stylish throwback mystery series led by Natasha Lyonne, has hit a wall at Peacock after just two seasons – but the creator is already drawing up plans for a second life elsewhere, one that would radically reshape the show’s identity.

Peacock has officially cancelled Poker Face only four months after the second season wrapped, despite the series consistently ranking among the service’s most talked-about originals.

Behind the scenes, however, the numbers were less flattering. The second season reportedly dipped in performance compared to its buzzy debut, and the show was an expensive outlier on Peacock’s slate: produced externally by MRC Television rather than in-house at NBCUniversal, with a star lead, stacked guest casts, and a new location almost every week. In a corporate environment obsessed with cost per minute and ownership, that made Poker Face an easier target than its fanbase might like to admit.

The sting is sharper because Poker Face had quickly become a comfort-watch for mystery fans. The series followed Charlie Cale, a drifter with an uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying, wandering across America in her beat-up car and stumbling into murders in casinos, truck stops, retirement homes, and dingy clubs. The premise was knowingly pulpy – a human lie detector with no sci-fi explanation – but it was sold with such confidence that viewers happily bought into the gimmick. Lyonne’s smoky voice, messy charm and half-hungover swagger gave Charlie an emotional reality that grounded even the most heightened cases of the week.

For many fans, Poker Face was Lyonne’s show as much as Johnson’s. Audiences followed her from Orange Is the New Black and Russian Doll precisely for that brash, throaty wit she brings to every line. Season 1 was widely seen as lightning in a bottle; Season 2, while still enjoyed by plenty of viewers, didn’t quite hit the same highs for everyone, feeling a little more predictable even as the guest stars and set-pieces remained strong. Still, the consensus online wasn’t that the show had burned out – it was that it deserved time to recalibrate, not a sudden stop.

Johnson, however, isn’t treating Peacock’s decision as a full stop. According to industry reports, he is actively shopping Poker Face to other streamers, but with a twist that has already ignited fierce debate: if the series is revived, Natasha Lyonne will no longer play Charlie Cale on screen. Instead, Johnson wants to turn Charlie into a kind of rotating mantle, with a new performer taking over every two seasons. The first in line, should a deal come together, is none other than Peter Dinklage, the Game of Thrones star whose dry intelligence and world-weary irony made Tyrion Lannister the standout character of that series. Lyonne would remain attached as an executive producer and creative partner but step aside from the lead role.

On paper, the idea sounds like a fascinating experiment: a noir-tinted cousin to Doctor Who, where the same archetypal gumshoe is reimagined by different actors over time, allowing the show to reinvent its tone while preserving its core structure of self-contained mysteries. In practice, it’s a much tougher sell, because Poker Face doesn’t have any in-universe logic to justify a “new” Charlie. Fans have already pointed out that regeneration works for a time-traveling alien; it’s harder to apply that logic to a chain-smoking casino worker who can tell when you’re lying. Without a clever narrative bridge, recasting risks feeling like a financial tactic disguised as a creative choice.

The reaction from viewers has been loud and divided. Some are open to the change, arguing that Dinklage is one of the few actors charismatic enough to carry such a bold pivot and that an anthology-style lead swap could keep the series fresh if handled carefully. Others are flat-out rejecting the notion, insisting that Lyonne is simply irreplaceable and that she’s the reason they tuned in week after week, more than the premise itself. There’s also discomfort around swapping out a beloved female lead for a male successor in an era when strong, distinctive women leads in genre television are still comparatively rare. A vocal faction would rather see Johnson write a brand-new mystery vehicle tailored specifically to Dinklage than retrofit him into Charlie Cale’s shoes.

Layered on top of that is growing frustration with the streaming landscape in general. Viewers are watching one of Peacock’s most visible originals disappear after two seasons while other, less-talked-about shows quietly linger, and they’re struggling to parse the logic. The opaque metrics, the reliance on short orders, and the willingness to axe critically praised series have fuelled the feeling that the “golden age of streaming” has morphed into an era of ruthless cost-cutting. Poker Face becoming another casualty only reinforces the impression that audiences are investing emotionally in stories that platforms see as disposable line items.

Still, Johnson and Lyonne are publicly framing this as a pivot rather than a eulogy. They’ve said they’ve been nurturing this next phase since work on the Season 2 finale, suggesting that the idea of evolving Charlie was already on the whiteboard long before Peacock pulled the plug. Their message to fans is essentially: give us a little time, and there’s a real chance you’ll meet Charlie Cale again out on some lonely stretch of highway, even if the face behind the wheel has changed. For now, the first two seasons remain available to stream on Peacock – a complete, if unfinished, slice of modern TV detective storytelling, and potentially the prologue to a stranger, riskier second act.