HBO may be in the business of saving Poker Face.
During a 2026 HBO Max programming slate presentation hosted by Casey Bloys at New York’s Hudson Yards, the HBO and HBO Max chairman and CEO said the network actually heard the original pitch for Rian Johnson‘s series that was just canceled at Peacock.
“We heard the original take,” he told The Hollywood Reporter during the Thursday presser, “and when I heard that Peacock wasn’t moving forward, we were curious. So we’ve had conversations, but I don’t know which way it’ll go. But I think Rian is a fantastic filmmaker, and I love the idea of Peter Dinklage, but I have nothing to report on that.”
Last week, Peacock surprise canceled the Natasha Lyonne-led Poker Face after two seasons, but series creator Johnson had said he was looking to take the show to another outlet with Game of Thrones and HBO alum Dinklage as the new lead actor, replacing Lyonne.
Peacock canceled the Columbo-inspired detective procedural about four months after the conclusion of season two, which didn’t perform as well as the first installment that released in 2023, based on available ratings data. The Hollywood Reporter previously reported that even though though Poker Face was among Peacock’s most watched original shows, and reviews remained positive, it was an expensive show to make — and bringing in a new lead actor would essentially mean having to relaunch the show — and not produced in-house at NBCUniversal. The series is produced by Johnson and Ram Bergman’s T-Street and independent studio MRC Television.
Johnson and MRC said they planned to shop Poker Face to other outlets, with star Lyonne no longer in the lead role of Charlie Cale (but remaining on bard as an executive producer). Dinklage signed on to play Charlie, precipitating the idea that, going forward, a new lead actor would play Charlie every two seasons.
“We’ve been germinating this next move together since writing the season two finale,” Johnson and Lyonne said in a statement at the time. “We love our Poker Face and this is the perfect way to keep it rolling. Give us a beat and we may just see Charlie Cale again down that open highway.”
The second season ended with a near-death for Lyonne’s Charlie — which is a common plot on the series for the scrappy detective who has a sixth sense for when people are lying. Johnson spoke to THR about the risky ending, which ended with a “To Be Continued” as Charlie drove her Plymouth Barracuda off a cliff, only for the series to then pull it back and reveal after the coda that she had survived.
“I was just giggling in the edit room getting the timing of that exactly right with Natasha,” Johnson, who created, writes and directs, said of the finale cliffhanger gag. “Peacock was a little nervous. They were like, ‘Do you have to put To Be Continued?’ I was like, ‘I think it will be fine.’ It’s another great harkening back to the commercial break cuts that I grew up with [on TV shows] as a kid. A car would go off the ramp at the Universal backlot, the show would freeze frame and it would be like, ‘How are they going to get out of this one!’”
Johnson had said talks for season three hadn’t yet begun, but he already had ideas spinning and sounded hopeful: “You never know how something is going to do, and honestly, I have a feeling those conversations are just about to start, so we’ll see. I don’t want to count any chickens. With television today, that’s the balancing act. You leave it open in case you’re lucky enough to come back, and have it end on a place that is satisfying if things don’t go that way.”
For season two, Tony Tost took over as showrunner from Nora and Lilla Zuckerman. Johnson and Bergman executive produce for T-Street; Tost, the Zuckerman sisters, Chris Provenzano, Adam Arkin and Nena Rodrigue also executive produced season two.
Also during Thursday’s HBO event with Bloys, the network announced a slew of season renewals for Task, TheChair Company, I Love L.A.and Game of Thrones prequels House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
Bloys also confirmed the speculated news that the next season of The White Lotus will film in France (creator Mike White is writing and “very, very early” in the casting process, he said), and that they also have no news to report, but are thinking, about a second season of The Penguin following The Batman 2.
Tony Maglio and Rick Porter contributed to this story.
