Fandom Thoughts on Poker Face, filtered through Buffy
We're watching Poker Face. The concept is that a woman, Charlie, has a "power", in that she can instantly listen to you say something and know if you're telling the truth. She had been using it to see through bluffs in various poker games, until she gets found out and frozen out. Then the first episode happens and she's on the run, hiding from the public eye and working cash-under-the-table jobs. If you can imagine a 40-year-old woman as Peter Falk as Columbo, you pretty much have the vibe of the stories.
And we watch because Columbo is my wife's jam. She likes Criminal Minds and such, and when I pushed her to watch Buffy, she said "That's Nicholas Brendan! That's Penelope's boyfriend, Kevin!" But Columbo has been her jam since before I knew her. But Columbo is a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, and so his investigations will always be within L.A. Poker Face changes locations every episode, because she's in hiding, and when a thing like a band's social media prank or an errant but necessary ATM transaction occurs, she has hours to get out of town before the people following her come around.
To my mind, this is where post-S7 Faith has to be. Her body count is not high enough to make the Most Wanted list, so she'll be able to live here and there, but she can't really set down roots. Her Big Bad is always the repercussions of her past, in the form of the FBI hunting down futitives crossing state lines. At the same time, as much as I would love that show, I get why Eliza Dushku went with Tru Calling instead. (I really don't know how much of S7 is back-door pilots that never went anywhere, Whedon and Mutant Enemy throwing characters and ideas for a post-Buffy slayerverse show, but it does feel like a lot.)