Just a few weeks ago I subscribed to Peacock because I’d heard good things about the reboot of The Day of the Jackal, but before I started watching that, I got distracted by Poker Face, which friends had strongly recommended when it first appeared. It turns out that I got my money’s worth out of this initial investment in Peacock. Both shows are excellent, though I do have some quibbles with this new incarnation of The Day of the Jackal. More about that in a moment.
First, Poker Face. From its opening titles, which look like those we’d have seen in 1960’s-era television, Poker Face presents itself as a retro treat. It’s set very much in the modern day, and its language is too coarse ever to appear on network television in the 20th Century, but it’s still a refreshing return to the days when a weekly episode was self-contained; that is, we’d get a conflict at the beginning, complications in the middle, and a resolution at the end. (I gather that the official tv lingo for such shows is “case of the week.”) These episodes run less than an hour but include all the pleasures of the best vintage Columbo movies, and there’s a cheerful Columbo-like persistence to Natasha Lyonne’s character Charlie Cale, who just can’t let a misdeed go without setting it right.
The gimmick is that Charlie, played with an endearing bourbon-and-cigarettes rasp by Lyonne, can always tell when somebody is lying. She’s not a superhero. She’s very much flesh and blood, and she can get hurt as badly as anybody else; nevertheless, she does have that one skill of identifying a falsehood every time she hears one. She thus becomes a skilled amateur detective—not a policewoman, as she is quick to point out—and therefore not necessarily interested in following legal procedures herself. In the first episode her skills get her into trouble with a dangerous man in Las Vegas, and his pursuit of her allows for the season-long plot device of her moving from town to town to seek subsistence work while she tries to outrun her predator. We’re talking about The Fugitive crossed with Route 66 (sorry, younger readers; you’ll have to Google those) in a series of beautifully written mysteries. I pride myself on being able to anticipate where a plot is going, but I’ve always been surprised by at least one plot twist and every denouement during the first season. (Season Two is on the way.) Perhaps the ingenious plotting should be no surprise with Rian Johnson, the Knives-Out guy, as the creator of the series.
Now for The Day of the Jackal. Frederick Forsyth published a bestseller by that name in 1971, and in 1973 Fred Zinnemann directed a hit movie that was plenty faithful to the novel. What’s now playing in ten episodes on Peacock has almost no resemblance to the original story. Yes, there’s a skilled assassin nicknamed The Jackal, and yes, there’s a determined MI-6 agent pursuing him, but the story transpires in the modern day. There’s no mention of Charles DeGaulle because the target this time is an Elon-Musk-like tech billionaire. I’m going to get my quibbles out of the way first without providing any spoilers. Complaint Number One: how does that woman who represents his clients keep finding the Jackal when nobody else on the planet seems capable of doing so? Complaint Number Two: At the end of the final season, one character asks another, “How did you survive that?” Good question, since what just happened would have been unsurvivable in real life.
But let’s talk about the strengths of this excellent entertainment. First of all, Eddie Redmayne establishes himself as an actor of astonishing range. Moviegoers who know him as Newt Scamander in the Harry Potter universe remember a bashful, stammering, animal-loving innocent, a Hugh Grant with a magic wand. Sometimes we glimpse that diffidence here, but only when the Jackal is playing a role himself. Redmayne assumes multiple personas to disguise himself in the course of the story, but his steely, implacable Jackal manages to be both terrifying and sympathetic. Lashana Lynch, who plays Bianca Pullman, the British agent tasked with finding and stopping the Jackal, turns in an equally superb performance in a well-written role. Both characters try to juggle the love for their families—both have a spouse and one child—with the extremities of their work. The police are not especially good guys in this show, and the Jackal is not entirely evil. In fact, the moral ambiguity keeps us just as riveted as the action sequences do. Both the Jackal and Bianca Pullman do reprehensible things, and yet both earn our sympathy. Moreover, the Jackal’s target is an arrogant, insufferable man, but what that target wants to do for the world is admirable and unselfish. The people who want him dead are the true villains. Poker Face ends each episode with poetic justice. The Day of the Jackal does nothing of the kind, but, like Poker Face, it does deliver a rousing good time.