Happy Face Is Exactly What It Hates Most

There’s no doubt that the rising popularity of the true crime genre is concerning. Podcasts like Crime Junkies and My Favorite Murder have turned a morbid fascination into a cash cow, and TV series were quick to follow, from Ryan Murphy’s glitzy depictions of the assassination of Gianni Versace and the Menendez murders, to not one but two different miniseries about the alleged murderer Candy Montgomery.

It’s now a pretty cold take to say true crime should focus more on the victims, something attempted in recent projects like Netflix’s Woman of the Hour. But the latest attempt is also the most confusing: even though it is about a real serial murderer, so much of the actual story is fictionalized to the point of fanfiction. But bizarrely, Happy Face, the tedious new true-crime thriller on Paramount+, still tries to moralize about the rise of true crime.

Happy Face opens with Melissa Moore (Annaleigh Ashford), a makeup artist on The Dr. Greg Show, the most shameless Dr. Phil analog you’ve ever seen. But she hides a dark secret: her father is Keith Hunter Jasperson (Dennis Quaid), the serial murderer otherwise known as “Happy Face.” Without Melissa’s knowledge, he murdered at least eight women in the 1990s, and in the first episode of Happy Face, he claims responsibility for yet another murder. Melissa joins forces with Ivy (Tamera Tomaliki), a producer on The Dr. Greg Show, to investigate Keith’s claims and possibly get the current suspect exonerated before his execution.

Meanwhile, coming forward with her true identity fractures Melissa’s family life, especially that of her daughter Hazel (Khiyla Aynne), who suddenly finds herself in the cool club because of what her grandfather did. In one of the most egregious moments in the show, the most popular girl in class calls herself a “murderino” — an extremely niche term used to refer to the fans of My Favorite Murder — and takes Hazel to a “murder museum.”

We’re meant to gawk at the weird people who obsess over true crime, but that’s exactly what Happy Face does. If the series was about a fictionalized criminal, then the outrageous fictional events that happen in the back half of the series would be understandable. But instead, we’re given a mostly-made-up story that doesn’t quite lionize a murderer, but doesn’t condemn him either. You don’t cast Dennis Quaid, the dad from The Parent Trap, as a character you don’t want audiences to feel for, no matter how great he was playing against type in The Substance.

Happy Face can’t decide what it wants to be: wish fulfillment media for true-crime junkies or a takedown of the very genre. Instead, it becomes weirdly self-contradictory, dedicating whole episodes to Keith and his family, only for Melissa to complain that they have been forgetting the victims. Meanwhile, the victims they focus on are completely fictional. It’s almost like the writers realized halfway through that they’re supposed to have the moral high ground.

This is nothing against the cast — Annaleigh Ashford is a Broadway vet who has proved herself a natural on television, and Quaid is annoyingly likable. But there’s no real way to “fix” Happy Face: even its rug-pull ending feels more like an episode of SVU than anything vaguely believable. The issue is its existence itself.

There’s nothing inherently awful about true-crime content, as long as it is aware of how exploitative it can get: look at Hulu’s The Thing About Pam, one of the campiest true-crime thrillers in decades. By purporting itself to be a series that isn’t afraid to discuss the problems with that fascination, it only highlights how blatantly it repeats those very issues.

Happy Face is now streaming on Paramount+.