There are shows that remind you how to watch television — and then there’s Peacock’s “Poker Face,” which reminds you how to look at America. How to see it, in motel wallpaper and truck stop coffee; how to hear it, in the cough of a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda as it grudgingly turns over at dawn.

When “Poker Face” arrived last year, it felt like a small miracle disguised as a procedural throwback: a comic “howcatchem” in the vein of “Columbo,” brought to life by Rian Johnson’s genre-loving precision and Natasha Lyonne’s whiskey-worn voice, equal parts cigarette ash and tenderness. It re-imagined the detective show as a drifting folk song about secrets you can’t keep buried in places nobody wants to look at too closely.

Season 2 picks up where we left off: with Charlie Cale still behind the wheel of her battered sky-blue 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, burning miles and bridges in equal measure. If Season 1 was the birth of a myth — Charlie the human lie detector, Charlie the last honest witness — then Season 2 is about what happens to a myth when the road refuses to end and the ghosts multiply behind the rear view mirror.

Charlie, played by Lyonne at her warmest and weirdest, is a drifter with a parlor trick no one quite understands: she knows, instantly, when you’re lying. She doesn’t know how she knows. She can’t turn it off. She can’t stop caring. And she can’t stop believing, deep down, that people might just surprise her by doing the right thing anyway.

She’s a true naif — not naïve in the sense of foolish, but genuinely innocent in spirit despite the grime she walks through. Like Huck Finn, she’s more morally curious than book-smart; she watches lies unravel in every town she floats through, yet keeps her own code intact.

Like Voltaire’s Candide, Charlie is a wanderer through a deeply flawed world who cannot help but hold onto a stubborn belief that people can be good, despite constant evidence to the contrary. Candide keeps saying “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” and though Charlie’s version is gruffer and more skeptical, her actions say the same thing: Maybe people will surprise me this time.

Season 2 picks up with Charlie still in motion, bridges burned behind her, miles unspooling ahead. If last season birthed a modern folk hero — Charlie the last honest witness — this season wonders what happens when the big villains fade but America’s ordinary cruelties........

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