Season 1 of Poker Face, Rian Johnson’s eclectic crime dramedy starring Natasha Lyonne as a woman who can always tell when someone is lying, was one of Peacock’s first truly fantastic series. Each Columbo-esque episode spun a uniquely wild tale of murder, mystery, and people realizing how different their understandings of the truth can be. And you could see that its massive cast of guest stars was having a ball hamming it up as ridiculous characters that felt like they were ripped right out of a game of Clue.

Though every episode dropped Lyonne’s character, Charlie Cale, into a new situation involving people she’d just met, Poker Face’s first season was still very much a larger story about her being on the run and trying to stay one step ahead of shady figures from her past. The dangerous stakes of that narrative seemed like something that Poker Face might want to crank up when Peacock renewed the series for its second season.

But when I spoke with Johnson recently, he told me that he was never all that interested in fiddling with the scope of Poker Face’s narrative. For him, the joy of crafting Charlie Cale’s story has always been rooted in figuring out how to create novel, emotionally driven connections between her and the odd people she meets. And since the original formula worked so well the first time around, Johnson felt that sticking to it for season 2 would be his best bet.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I have to ask: how did The Verge end up in Glass Onion, Rian?

You guys are one of the sites I check every day both for your tech and entertainment coverage, and when we needed an outlet that would be writing about someone like Miles Braun, you guys made a lot of sense.

He’s definitely the sort of guy we’d be discussing in Slack.

[laughing] Yeah, there might possibly be some present-day equivalencies between him and people in the news.

I was listening to an interview of yours where you explained how, with season 2, you weren’t really thinking about taking the show in a new direction, but rather sticking with the classic formula and getting fresh things out of it. What sorts of things felt “fresh” to you as you were planning out these new episodes?

This show is so much a tribute to the type of TV that I grew up watching. Columbo’s the obvious one, but Quantum Leap is another that we’re really taking a lot of inspiration from. To me, the freshness every week comes from the world that Charlie finds herself in and the little microcosmic world that you end up exploring in that specific episode.

That’s the Quantum Leap factor, I think. But Charlie’s relationships with the people she meets are also important. Because Charlie’s not a cop and it’s not her job to investigate these things, one of the challenges and fun things about writing the show is finding a way in for her every week. That has to be emotional, and it has to be a relationship-based thing that pulls her into solving the mystery.

Were there any things you wanted to do differently this season?

Really, with every single episode, as much as every setting has to be different, we’re also trying to figure out new ways in for Charlie in terms of how she can bounce up against new characters and form new dynamics with them.

I’m really, really proud of how “Sloppy Joseph,” the grade school episode, came out. That started with us in the room asking “what are the lowest stakes we can build a Poker Face episode on,” and it ended up becoming a real nail-biter of an episode because when you’re in a grade school, there’s nothing higher stakes than the internal politics of kids. So, you have Charlie dealing with a classic, The Bad Seed–style relationship with a kid, but we also see a genuine romance between her and Cory Hawkins’ character in “One Last Job.”

What do you make of this moment right now where we’re seeing single actors playing twins, or in Poker Face’s example, quintuplets?

That’s a really good question, because you’re right, there is kind of like a moment happening right now, but I’m not entirely sure why. For Poker Face, though, that was another way we were reaching back to Columbo — specifically the episode “Double Shock” where Martin Landau is playing a pair of evil twins. And that episode is also really playing into soap-opera-style storytelling where twins being played by the same person is tradition.

You mentioned “One Last Job” and “Sloppy Joseph.” Are either of those episodes your darlings this season?

They are all my children. But, because this season overlapped exactly with the production of Wake Up Deadman, I only got to direct one episode this season, “The Game Is A Foot.” It’s an episode that Laura Deeley wrote and it has Cynthia [Erivo] playing sisters.

It was a really, really special experience getting to work with Cynthia — seeing her bring her talent to the table, but also her sense of calm. She had to hold all those characters in her head, and we were shooting for 10 days in a very low-tech way where we would just leave the camera set up, she would do one half of the conversation, go do a 45-minute costume change, come back, and do the other half. To see somebody with that type of talent working at that level and holding it all together in such a cool way was a real highlight.

Poker Face season 2 premieres on May 8th.