Poker Face (TV series)

Laughlin casino cocktail waitress Charlie Cale, a woman with the ability to tell if someone is lying, observes her maid best friend Natalie Hill's abusive husband Jerry be ejected at work by head of security Cliff LeGrand. Manager Sterling Frost Jr. asks Charlie, an associate of his father's, to help him scam rich client Kazimir Caine. Natalie discovers child pornography on Caine's computer. When she reports it to Frost, he covertly deletes the evidence off her phone and has Cliff kill her and Jerry, staging it as a murder-suicide by using Jerry's gun. Charlie notices that Jerry's gun was in his right hand when she sees a crime scene photo, contradicting where his ankle holster was, and she steals Natalie's tablet from her house. She finds the deleted evidence in the tablet's trash and presents it to Frost, believing Caine was responsible for Natalie's murder. After seeing footage of Jerry being removed, she realizes that the metal detector did not go off when he went through it, meaning Cliff kept his gun. She reveals to Frost that she recorded him setting up the scam poker game and sent it to Caine, who informed the other big clients, irreparably damaging the casino's reputation. Frost commits suicide and Cliff shoots Charlie as she escapes. Frost Sr. calls her, promising to kill her.

Charlie's car breaks down in New Mexico and she gives it to obsessive mechanic Jed. She befriends passing trucker Marge. Both Jed and Subway worker Damian have a crush on convenience store clerk Sara. Damian asks him to lay off, and Jed pushes him off his body shop's roof when he realizes Damian has won the lottery, finishing him off with a crowbar. Jed takes the lottery ticket and hides the body in Marge's truck. She discovers it and tries to get rid of it, and Jed calls the police to frame her. Charlie's car is fixed, but Marge is blamed for Damian's murder and Jed claims the ticket as his own. Reviewing the body shop's security footage, Charlie notices it skips an hour and realizes Jed is lying when he says Damian did not win the lottery. When she points out that the serial number of his ticket does not match up with the time Jed claims to have bought it, he admits to the murder but reveals that he has discovered her identity as a person of interest and will report her if she calls the police. As she leaves town, she discovers that a trucker runs a hidden camera show that was unknowingly filming the murder and asks his friends to have him turn the footage in to the police. Sara misdirects an arriving Cliff after noticing he is armed, and Jed burns the ticket as the police arrive to arrest him.

Arriving in Texas, Charlie is followed by a volatile stray dog. The dog eats the food of customers at a barbecue restaurant owned by the Boyle brothers. The business-minded Taffy Boyle demands Charlie pay off what the dog ate. She takes a temporary job at the restaurant and bonds with George Boyle, the kind head chef. When she lends him a copy of the film Okja, he is deeply moved by its animal rights messaging and plans to give up his stake in the business. Unable to afford to buy him out, Taffy and his sister-in-law Mandy pre-record a segment for his radio show, which he plays to give himself an alibi as he drugs George, seals him inside his trailer, and suffocates him with smoke from a grill. He is attacked by the dog, who he beats. George's death is ruled a suicide, and a departing Charlie finds the dog, realizing that the wood it was hit with is the same wood used to create the smoke that killed George. After confirming that Taffy could have killed him during the broadcast by testing it herself, she brings her findings to Mandy and realizes she let someone else discover George's body to give her an alibi. Charlie confronts Taffy and reveals that the lack of the sound of a repeatedly passing train in the area confirms his recording was not live, while she has Austin, a man working at the radio station, impersonate Taffy and trick Mandy into thinking he is going to confess. She berates him for jeopardizing their plan and sells him out to the police, only for Austin to play her call on air while she is with the police. Charlie leaves, and Austin dedicates a show to her, having kept the dog for himself.

Charlie is hired by heavy metal band Doxxxology's vocalist Ruby Ruin to sell merchandise on the road, and befriends new drummer Gavin, who has a penchant for writing songs with lyrics based on things around him. Ruby is haunted by the band's only successful song, "Staplehead", and its success only benefiting the song's writer, their former drummer. She is horrified when Gavin presents the band with "Sucker Punch", a song that she is convinced will be a hit. The band rigs his amplifier and Ruby lets him have the scream note finish of "Staplehead", only for his microphone to fatally electrocute him. The band copies the lyrics of "Sucker Punch" and pass them off as their creation. Charlie realizes that "Sucker Punch"'s lyrics are based on items from Gavin's trash, and that his amp was switched for an older, more dangerous model the night of his death. After watching the video of Gavin's death from the camera he placed on stage to record his footwork, she notices that the rest of the band are all wearing shoes with thick soles to counter the shock. Before she can do anything about it, she discovers that a video of her punching another band's promotional mascot has gone viral, and Cliff, having tracked her using it, chases her through a Doxxxology show with her narrowly escaping. "Sucker Punch" revives interest in Doxxxology, but their lawyer reveals that the song's melody is lifted directly from the theme of the show Benson, resulting in a copyright lawsuit. Charlie sends a true crime podcaster that she met earlier her evidence that the band killed Gavin, and she makes an episode about them.

Charlie takes a job at a retirement home and befriends ex-felon residents Joyce Harris and Irene Smothers. They tell her of their past in a cult, where they fell in love with the leader Gabriel and were raided by the police, which cost Irene her ability to walk and sent them both to jail. They recognize a new resident as Gabriel under an assumed name, and he reveals that he sold his group out to the police and asks for forgiveness. They accept, but the next day, Irene sneaks into his room and poisons him, switching his wearable heart monitor with hers. She has Joyce tase her to trick the orderly into thinking Gabriel died of cardiac arrest. At his funeral, Charlie bumps into Luca Clark, the man claiming to be his nephew, but she gets him to admit that he is an FBI agent guarding Gabriel as part of witness protection. He explains that Irene and Joyce were actually raided for trying to bomb a Model UN meeting, and Charlie learns about the tasing at the time of Gabriel's death from a nosy resident. The woman tells Irene she saw them, and she and Joyce bomb her room. Charlie informs the two that Gabriel's heart rate did not increase when the staff tried to defibrillate him, proving their guilt, and they try to kill her. She tases herself while wearing a heart monitor, alerting the waiting FBI outside, who arrest the women. Later, when Charlie turns on a golf cart, she narrowly avoids death when it explodes, and gives Joyce and Irene the middle finger as they are driven away in the back of a police car.

Actress Kathleen Townsend visits her longtime nemesis and former costar Michael Graves to ask him for help putting on a one-night play to revitalize her career, and he reluctantly accepts after his wealthy wife Ava encourages him. Fed up with each other during the show, Kathleen rigs a light to kill Michael, and he rigs the stage's trapdoor to kill her. The light narrowly misses Michael, causing him to have a stress-induced heart attack. Ava runs to give him his medication, only to fall to her death through the door. Backstage, Kathleen and Michael reveal the entire show was a publicity stunt in their plan to publicly reveal their love for each other, having Ava killed so they could be together. With the show more popular than ever, Kathleen decides to give it another day, and Rebecca, the third actor in the play, demands payment from the two when she finds a script for a planned argument they had. During the second performance, Charlie, a waitress at the venue, realizes both actors were involved in the light and trapdoor sabotage and deduces that they are in love when their characters say they love each other. Kathleen tries to kill Rebecca through her fatal nut allergy by contaminating the prop food bowl her character eats from, forcing Charlie to go onstage and bluff off her rescue as part of the play. Kathleen and Michael argue backstage, and Charlie records their admission to their part in Ava's death and show it to the local sheriff in the audience. Kathleen uses her knowledge of her impending arrest to give a stellar final performance.

Aging Tennessee racer Keith Owens loses a competition to young Davis McDowell. Owens, his hands shaking whenever he sits down to race, announces his intent to retire and fights Davis when he picks on him. After Owens's prospective racer daughter Katy beats Davis in several rounds of go-karting, he vandalizes Owens's yard. Owens sneaks into Davis's garage and sabotages his car, but Davis witnesses this and instead sabotages it further. At his and Owens's practice session, he lets Katy drive his car, and it crashes, putting her in a coma. Having befriended Charlie, working at an arcade, and knowing of her lie detecting ability, Davis shifts the blame to Owens, and he publicly confesses his guilt when Charlie confronts him. She later notices Davis lying to a fan when he says Katy's crash was an accident, and he catches her looking in his garage. She realizes his guilt when he refuses to answer her questions, and he tries to run her off the road when she leaves, although she uses his own racing advice to escape. At Davis's next race, Charlie tells him that Katy woke up and will soon be racing against him after she recovers, and as she leaves, his hands start to shake as the race starts.

Max, the founder of pioneer visual effects company LAM, confronts co-founder Laura over something incriminating he found in old footage. She poisons him, and he jumps to his death. Charlie befriends the third co-founder of LAM, Arthur Liptin, and begins working as his assistant. He admits to her that he is still haunted by the drowning of Lily Albern, the actress who worked on LAM's first film Dragonfish, and blames himself for the incident. Laura asks Arthur to make a bust of Max's head to grieve, but actually uses it to pass the facial recognition software on his laptop and deletes a piece of Dragonfish footage from the archives. Arthur has an LAM archivist deliver the physical copy of the footage, and watching it, realizes Laura tampered with Lily's safety measure. Arthur burns the reel in front of Laura but secretly saves the incriminating bits, only to die from poisoning upon returning home. Charlie visits Laura and deduces she is lying about her involvement in Arthur and Max's deaths. Laura takes all of Arthur's things for a memorial exhibit at LAM's offices, but misses the hidden footage, which Charlie retrieves. As Laura eulogizes Arthur and Max at the exhibit's opening, Charlie plays the footage on the screen behind her, exposing her crime to the crowd. Unstable with guilt, she sees visions of Arthur and Max and follows the latter over a balcony to her death.

Charlie strikes up a romance in the Colorado mountains with a local, only to wind up stranded in the winter a few months later. She picks up drifter Mortimer "Morty" Bernstein, and while driving, she swerves to avoid a deer and crashes. She has Morty go get a tow truck, and when she does not return, she tries to flag down a car for help, only to be hit by Trey Nelson, a man on house arrest out violating his parole. Panicking, he drives her to his estranged friend Jimmy Silva's motel and has him reluctantly help bury her outside. Charlie wakes up with a broken leg and crawls out of the hole, knocking on the lodge door with a stick she found just as Morty arrives in Charlie's car. As a blizzard traps the four in the lodge, Morty realizes the stick is actually a bone and theorizes it could belong to Chloe Jones, a local woman who vanished a decade earlier. She goes back to where Charlie was buried and takes pictures of Chloe's remains. Trey follows her and she agrees to take his Lamborghini in exchange for her silence, but he beats her unconscious and pushes her over a cliff in the car. Jimmy drugs Charlie and Trey tells him he killed Morty, and they argue about their roles in Chloe's death, who they buried where they buried Charlie. After having pretended to be drugged, Charlie tries to take her car keys, but is caught, and convinces Jimmy, who loved Chloe, that Trey killed her. Trey kills him and stabs Charlie, burying them with Chloe and arriving home just in time to meet with his parole officer, only to realize Charlie took his ankle monitor while they fought. In the hospital, Charlie learns that Trey was arrested and Morty was mistaken for her. She is elated to learn that she is considered dead, but Cliff waits for her outside the hospital.

Fed up with his year-long pursuit of Charlie, Cliff makes a deal with Frost Sr.'s rival Beatrix Hasp, agreeing to kill Frost Sr. and pin it on Charlie. Alerted to her location by news of her "death," Cliff finds her hospital room and calls Frost Sr., who orders him to wait until she is healed. Cliff forces her into his car after her release, and she asks if he killed Natalie. He gives her a gun and tries to goad her into shooting him, but she is unable to. As he takes her to Hasp's Atlantic City casino, he swaps a gift Frost Sr. has for her with an identical gun. Frost Sr. reveals that he has all his casinos wiretapped and learned that his son was dealing with Hasp against his wishes, and he no longer blames Charlie for his death, asking for help dealing with Hasp as he gives her the gift. The lights go out and Cliff kills Frost Sr. with the gun with Charlie's fingerprints on it, swapping it with the one in the box. She flees and calls Clark, who says he is unable to help and advises her to run. Charlie hides out in her estranged sister's house, who gives her the keys to their father's boat but asks her to leave, not wanting her and her daughter involved. Charlie finds the boat damaged and reluctantly calls Cliff, who asks her to meet him on his boat. While he stalls so the police can arrive, she finds poker chips from Hasp's casino that glow under blacklight and realizes Cliff used them to mark Frost Sr. and see him in the dark. She fights him off and jumps ship just as the FBI arrive to arrest him, Charlie having sent Clark Frost Sr.'s recording of Frost ordering Cliff to kill Natalie. Cliff testifies against Hasp and Charlie's name is cleared, only for Hasp to call her and give her the choice between working for her or dying. Charlie destroys her phone and flees in her car.