It’s often said that television is a writers’ medium, but that’s because scripts are a delivery device for the format’s true lifeblood: plot. However interesting a project’s themes may be, it requires structure and momentum to propel the action multiple episodes. So to develop the story of Melissa Moore (Annaleigh Ashford), the author, podcaster, and adult daughter of so-called “Happy Face Killer” Keith Jesperson (Dennis Quaid), into a series, showrunner Jennifer Cacicio (“Your Honor,” “Sexy Beast”) and executive producers Robert and Michelle King (“The Good Fight,” “Elsbeth”) couldn’t just look backward. When Melissa was a teenager, she learned her father had killed at least eight women across the country while working as a truck driver. As an adult, Cacicio and the Kings must populate Melissa’s present with more urgent conflicts, a necessary strategy that can nonetheless cloud the weightiest ideas of the resulting series, straightforwardly titled “Happy Face.”
The Kings are best known as masters of the modern procedural, packing religious allegory (“Evil”) or political scheming (“The Good Wife”) into sub-50-minute boxes that feel elegantly abundant — never overstuffed. But their collaboration with Cacicio stretches a single case over eight installments. Perhaps as a result, “Happy Face” lacks the nimble, playful, ever-shifting tone that generally marks a Kings show, even one that deals with serial murder. (Producing director Michael Showalter has a comedy background that’s helped inflect balancing acts like “The Dropout,” but “Happy Face” is firmly a drama.) As a result, the show pads Melissa’s quest to face down her past with auxiliary subplots, some more effective at externalizing her dysfunction than others.
When “Happy Face” begins, Melissa has successfully built the stable, idyllic family life she herself was denied, living in a spacious Seattle home with her mild-mannered husband Ben (James Wolk) and their children, teenage Hazel (Khiyla Anne) and 9-year-old Max (Benjamin Mackey). Despite her father being imprisoned just a few hours’ drive away, Melissa has shut Keith out for most of the last 30 years, until he finds a way into her life she can’t ignore: through her job as a makeup artist on a daytime talk show, hosted by local celebrity Dr. “Not Phil” Greg (David Harewood). When Keith calls Greg up directly to confess to a murder another man was convicted of back in the ‘90s, it’s catnip for both the producers and Melissa’s lingering guilt.
Exonerating Elijah (Damon Gumpton), the man facing a death sentence that may rightfully be Keith’s, gives Melissa and producer Ivy (Tamera Tomakili) — and “Happy Face” itself — something tangible to focus on while Melissa sorts through much fuzzier feelings about her potential culpability for Keith’s crimes, whether she and her family members count as victims and the tiny kernel of filial love she can’t seem to extinguish. Ashford, a veteran of both Broadway and the Kings-verse (like many New York-area actors, she’s appeared in both “Evil” and “The Good Fight”), makes the most of a conflicted woman who impulsively acts on feelings she doesn’t fully understand. But while Moore’s predicament is chillingly real, the revived cold case is an invention of the show’s, and unfortunately, the obligation to craft a riveting story and the effort to make a larger statement about true crime mania don’t always align.
“Happy Face” is fundamentally a work of true crime that aims to critique, or at least compensate for the shortcomings of, other works of true crime. Quaid builds on his supporting turn in last year’s “The Substance” as an even more malevolent avatar of predatory masculinity, but “Happy Face” is careful to keep the focus on Melissa, Elijah and the grieving families Keith has left in his wake. Yet by the time Ivy insists she wants to pivot away from “missing girls and sad moms” to more meaningful investigative work, we’ve already spent hours watching a show that features both — and uses a real-life killer as a hook to get us in the door.
Hazel, who’s now the same age Melissa was when Keith was apprehended, and Ben, who’s worried about how public scrutiny could affect his family, each get their own subplots to flesh “Happy Face” out. Ben’s struggles are milquetoast and marginal until an absurd, late-breaking escalation; Hazel’s are yet another angle from which to comment on the true-crime craze, with the added flourish of teen-girl-on-teen-girl emotional violence from her so-called “friends.” Neither storyline ever outgrows the sense of being auxiliary to the central push-pull between Melissa and Keith.
That dance is captivating: Keith treats Melissa and the media alike as objects to be manipulated for attention and control, while Melissa gradually accepts there are no hidden depths of her estranged family member to understand. But the messiness of their relationship sits uneasily alongside the straightforward search for evidence to free Elijah, and can lose its grip when broadened from a two-hander to a broader ensemble. “Happy Face” intrigues, yet its form can’t quite sync up with its function.
The first two episodes of “Happy Face” are now streaming on Paramount+, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Thursdays.
