As Poker Face gains in popularity, could a full-scale episodic TV revival be on the cards?

Hundreds of hours of stuff you’ll never watch. Hundreds of hours of stuff you’ll start watching but never finish.

Hundreds of hours of stuff you’ll never get the chance to finish because the broadcaster decides not enough other people are watching and cancels it.

You can blame this on the proliferation of streaming services, which are springing up like mushrooms in a damp wood.

It seems that every time you turn your back, a new one materialises to beg for your attention, your money and, most preciously, your time.

It’s the time that’s the biggest problem. Watching television can be exhausting. More TV usually means longer TV. Series that once might have run for six or eight episodes per season are now running for 10 or 12.

The most drastic example was last year’s fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things. On paper, it consisted of nine episodes. But the season was split into two “volumes” totalling 13 hours.

And it felt like it too. It was bloated, meandering and self-indulgent. Not that this bothered hardcore Stranger Things fanatics. They binged on it till they were bleary-eyed. I shudder to think how long the fifth and final season, which has been stalled by the Hollywood writers’ strike, might be. Fifteen hours? Twenty hours? Six months?

There are hints that things might be changing, however. Netflix, the oldest of the streamers and, at €14.99 a month for a standard HD subscription, also the most expensive, is the only one adhering to the all-episodes-at-once model it pioneered a decade ago with its first original series, Lilyhammer and House of Cards.

The others tend to offer the first two or three episodes of a new season together, with the rest arriving weekly. So far, nobody has complained.

It seems viewers are quite happy to wait a week for a new episode of their favourite series — just like we had to back in the days when the world was in black and white and television sets ran on paraffin.

We were once told the future of television lies in binge-watching; now it seems the future might actually lie in the episodic shows of the past, where each week’s standalone drama had a beginning, middle and end, and everything was neatly wrapped up in an hour, including ad breaks, or 50 minutes if you happened to be watching on the BBC.

The most delightful surprise of 2023 so far is Poker Face (Sky Max), Rian (Knives Out) Johnson’s glorious throwback to the American cop and private-eye shows that dominated television in the 1970s. After so many bloated streaming series, it’s a refreshing palate-cleanser.

The wonderful Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a former gambler and casino worker with the ability to tell instantly when someone is lying. Each week Charlie fetches up in a new place, with a new set of characters and a new murder to solve.

Johnson’s inspiration for Poker Face was Columbo. We see the murder at the top of the episode and we know who the perpetrator is. The fun is in watching Charlie use her gift as “a human lie-detector” to piece the puzzle together.

Peter Falk’s crumpled detective usually engaged in a battle of wits with murderers who were wealthy and privileged, whereas Charlie travels along blue-collar America’s freeways and dusty backwaters, with their dive-bars, fast food joints, low-rent motels, gas stations and diners.

Poker Face is also influenced by The Fugitive and The Incredible Hulk, which featured protagonists who never stayed in one place for long. Like Richard Kimble and David Banner, Charlie has a pursuer on her tail: a hitman employed by her former boss, a casino owner who blames her for his son’s death.

With her quick, acerbic wit, Charlie also shares DNA with Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files, another 70s classic.

The episodic, case-of-the-week detective show never entirely disappeared from screens. The daft-but-entertaining The Mentalist, for example, enjoyed great success from 2008 to 2015.

But it’s been a long time since we’ve seen one that sparkles like Poker Face. Could a full-scale episodic TV revival be on the cards?