Happy Face Is a 2-Hour True Crime Story Stretched Over 8 Long Hours

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The podcast to television drama pipeline is alive and well in 2025, the latest being Paramount+’s scripted drama adaptation of Melissa Moore’s true-crime podcast Happy Face. Starring Annaleigh Ashford (Welcome to Chippendales) as Moore, the series is primarily told from her perspective as the daughter of serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson—aka the Happy Face killer. Equal parts investigative thriller and family drama about the trauma fallout of being related to a notorious murderer, Happy Face is unfortunately a big miss in this genre. Despite a strong start, Happy Face suffers from the common problem of a story that would be better served as a movie rather than eight hours of extra long episodes.

Developed and showrun by Jennifer Cacicio (Your Honor), the Happy Face pilot, “The Confession,” opens in the Pacific Northwest where Moore lives with her family, happily married to nice guy Ben (an underused James Wolk), and parenting their 15-year old daughter Hazel (Khiyla Aynne) and sweet nine-year old moppet, Max (Benjamin Mackey). Moore is a makeup artist on The Dr. Greg Show (a thinly-veiled Dr. Phil Show), where she’s a master at making sure the show’s often emotionally tortured guests look their best on camera (a double meaning for the show’s title). Turns out, Moore’s had a lot of practice hiding her own tears, keeping secret from the world that she’s the daughter of the notorious Jesperson (Dennis Quaid), who’s serving life in prison at a nearby Oregon prison.

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However, the patina of normalcy for Moore cracks when her father sends a birthday card to her daughter, which she quickly yoinks and hides away in a safe full of unopened correspondence from her father. Livid and triggered by his unwelcome intrusion after so many years, she buys a burner phone to leave a message for him to leave her and her kids alone, or she’ll make his life miserable. Except, he’s already one step ahead of her with his own plan to upend every aspect of her life when he calls Dr. Greg (David Harewood) and forces her to admit that she’s his progeny. Jesperson then dangles the potential ratings gold of revealing a ninth victim exclusively to the show, specifically to his daughter, in a scheme to force her attention back on him.

Having stomped down her feelings about him and his murderous ways since he was arrested when she was 15, Moore has never worked through her complex emotions in therapy. She’s pretty much a live wire primed to exploit, and boy, oh, boy, is she in this series. Jesperson, Dr. Greg, even Ivy (Tamera Tomakili), the empathetic show producer assigned to investigate this long hidden victim, all see Moore as a means to their individual ends, which portends a potentially fascinating exploration of inflicted celebrity, revictimization, PTSD and even the responsibility of predatory media.

Unfortunately, the writers barely touch on those interesting avenues, instead pursuubg a perfunctory and excessively long and drawn out breadcrumb trail of evidence and multitudes of red herrings involving Elijah (Damon Gupton), the man tried and convicted in Texas for the murder of the ninth victim (and conveniently two months away from execution). There’s also the B-story of Moore’s long-delayed reckoning with her loathsome father that she still loves based on the “before times” when she just knew him as a great dad and not a remorseless psychopath. And lastly, a really uncomfortable C-story that gives way too much screen time to Hazel’s unsettling and morally vacant fascination with her newly revealed serial killer grandpappy.

The show becoming a disappointing exercise in diminishing returns is even more of a bummer because “The Confession” is actually a great pilot. It’s written by Cacicio and artfully directed by Michael Showalter, who has already shown his prowess in solidly establishing true crime podcasts as scripted TV series with the pilots of The Shrink Next Door and The Dropout. He knows exactly how to frame Ashford’s incredibly expressive face for maximum impact, always tight on Moore’s carefully applied, flawless makeup as she goes to war against the specter of her father’s deeds. The strength of the show’s introduction buys the series a lot of goodwill until about midseason where the treading water present in all of the overarching narratives becomes more and more apparent and tedious.

Initially it seems smart for the writers to put the audience in the shoes of Ivy and Melissa as they travel multiple times to Jesperson’s prison, where he tries to manipulate “Missy’s” conflicted emotions for tidbits of truth regarding the case, and then to Texas where the pair reinvestigate all of the leads and persons of interest who had anything to do with the ninth victim. However, being immersed in the middle of legwork tempers any real surprises and interesting twists, especially as the case gets overly convoluted with double backs and retracted progress. Aside from being frustrating, the writers are repetitive in how the same evidence and stories are trotted out again and again, just told in alternate character’s voices. This opens the door for the pursuit to get boring and it does, eventually leading to a resolution that matches the most left-field of Scooby-Doo conclusions.

It’s also maddening that from the top Moore is established as a reluctant participant in anything involving her father, but then she suddenly has no qualms in leaving her spiraling family unit for days at a time to be part of the case at their expense. Yes, guilt can be quite the motivator, but Moore borders on delinquent after Ben tells her that Max has been bodily threatened in their home by a victim’s family member and Hazel is in trouble with the law and caught lying. But everything is swept under the rug for the good of the case, and there’s an unsatisfying reset by series end that absolves some morally gnarly behavior by everyone to achieve a pat ending. It’s also a waste that Quaid is saddled with a one-note Jesperson, who uses every opportunity to stalk, cajole and harass his daughter so incessantly that you wonder why she’s giving this creep even a second of time past episode two. Rosy memories are one thing, but Jesperson actively being awful and graphically insensitive to her over and over means that her return visits are all about plot and not an ounce of actual emotion. Ashford and Quaid are robbed of really being able to go beneath the surface of their characters and confront one another authentically, which ultimately makes this whole endeavor extremely performative and hollow.

Happy Face premieres Thursday, March 20 on Paramount+.

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, IGN and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the latest, The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett, Bluesky @tarabennett.bsky.social, or Instagram @TaraDBen.

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