‘Happy Face’ Review: Dennis Quaid Plays a Serial Killer in a Paramount+ Drama That’s Half-Real, Half-Fictionalized and Entirely Misconceived

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Taking eight episodes for what would, in more efficient hands, be a pilot — and setting up a second season that’s somehow even less necessary — Paramount+’s Happy Face vacillates between sanctimonious and hypocritical, lashing out at the exploitative tropes of true crime and then embodying the genre’s worst instincts, with nothing especially perceptive to offer as compensation.

The show seems to attempt to present something intriguing, but it consistently fails to overcome the intellectual obstacles that stand in its way.

The show tries to be engaging and thought-provoking, but it keeps tripping over the intellectual challenges it encounters.

Created by Jennifer Cacicio (Your Honor), the series describes itself as “Inspired by a True Life Story.”

In this case, the story is that of Melissa Moore, who turned the ignominy of being the daughter of a notorious serial killer into an autobiography, podcast, crime correspondent gig with Dr. Phil and more additional TV appearances than a reasonable person could count.

The “inspiration” fueled by that true story is to take Melissa’s real life and graft a completely fictional, run-of-the-mill broadcast procedural plotline onto it, with results that appear not to have unsettled anybody on the creative team as much as they should have.

Here, Melissa lives in Washington, or someplace damp, with her boring banker hubby (James Wolk’s Ben), teenage daughter (Khiyla Aynne’s Hazel) and nine-year-old son (Benjamin Mackey’s Max). On Hazel’s 15th birthday, a weirdly insinuating card arrives that confuses Hazel and causes Melissa to freak out because she knows it’s from her dad, Keith Hunter Jesperson (Dennis Quaid), a notorious serial killer serving multiple life sentences for the murder of eight women. Ben, incidentally, is the only person in Melissa’s life who knows anything about her dad.

Melissa calls and leaves an angry message for her estranged dad, telling him to stay away from her family. Then she goes to work as a makeup artist on The Dr. Greg Show, a manipulative self-help series that proves that Happy Face is more fearful of name-checking Dr. Phil than a vicious serial killer. Keith responds to the call by reaching out to Dr. Greg (David Harewood) himself, forcing Melissa to out her family secret on national television with predictably stigmatizing responses. 

Keith puts the squeeze on Melissa’s actual empathy and Dr. Greg’s insincere television empathy by teasing that he was also responsible, but never credited, for a ninth murder — a crime for which an innocent man (Damon Gupton’s Elijah) is about to be executed in Texas. So Dr. Greg sends Melissa and producer Ivy (Tamera Tomakili) down to Texas to get answers with occasional assistance from the cackling Keith. Meanwhile, Melissa’s family falls apart.

On the surface, Happy Face is awash in protestations regarding all of the ways it’s different from by-the-numbers true crime. It makes fun of so-called murderinos, through a group of mean teens who suddenly glom onto Hazel when she becomes famous, though it doesn’t make fun of them very much. It derides shows like Dr. Greg, which offer soulless catharsis to an audience that really just wants to wallow in inhumanity, but not for long. It sneers at people who purchase art produced by serial killers as if Google searches for “How do I buy Keith Jesperson art?” won’t go through the roof after this series debuts.

Over and over, Happy Face has characters claim that the flaw of the genre is its fetishizing fixation on the killers, and not on the real victims — the killers’ innocent families (and maybe, a little bit, the actual victims and their families). It’s all fine and good to repeat “We’re a show about victims and not another opportunity to gawk at a killer.” But in Happy Face, the victims, other than Melissa, are all fictionalized, as are their families, and they feel like characters on a TV show played by decent, but generally forgettable guest stars. Keith Jesperson, nicknamed “the Happy Face Killer,” is completely real and is played by a movie star whom the series gets to feature in posters. He killed at least eight people and none of those people are honored by name or humanized, presumably because the show realized that would be gross and exploitative — as if erasing their identity is somehow less icky.

Melissa is real, but using the reality of her life as an excuse to tell a run-of-the-mill Innocence Project-style procedural story is bizarre, because everything in that story is padded and generic, not interesting on human or narrative levels. Then, to flesh out the story, Melissa’s family has been given various domestic storylines like, “Will Ben get a promotion at the bank?” and — I can’t emphasize enough how much I wish I were making this up — “Will Hazel wax or shave what is apparently a traumatizing quantity of pubic hair?” 

In summary, “Happy Face” employs a serial killer as a means to delve into its narrative. It provides an understanding that children of serial killers experience their own guilt and emotional turmoil, which I believe is accurate and stirs compassion within me. However, the character development in this series does not reach great heights.

Ashford is very good, wielding her high, breathy voice and easily bruised emotionality to deliver a very fair version of the real Melissa. Quaid is subtler than he was in The Substance, but for all the show’s expressed desire not valorize Keith, it still makes him look wily, artistically gifted and capable of wielding clout and romantic allure even from behind bars, which isn’t exactly not valorizing. Harewood is very good in the one chilling scene that pointedly exposes the hollowness of the Dr. Phil brand, but generally the show has no teeth in that area. Teach Grant has the series’ other sincerely effective scene as the son of one of Keith’s victims, a scene that’s inevitably followed by Ben (Wolk is completely wasted) doing something dumb and implausible.

Whatever Hunky Real Serial Killer Ryan Murphy Is Obsessed With.” However, creating a spinoff of “Monster” featuring Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers solving fake crimes would not be advisable. In essence, “Happy Face” takes a similar approach, but it’s best to avoid doing so.

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2025-03-18 17:09