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You know the feeling: you’re watching a shocking docudrama about a toxic waste scandal, or the baseless prosecution of 555 sub-postmasters, or the fraudulent founder of a blood-testing biotech company, and you start thinking – did this all really happen? So you do some digging online. Usually, it turns out there has been a mild massaging of the truth in the name of narrative efficiency: a couple of characters conflated, a timeline slightly rejigged. Only very occasionally (once?) will a case of dramatic licence result in a hysterical media storm, a global debate about the ethics of dramatisation and Netflix being hit with a $170m lawsuit. And yet it is almost unheard of to settle down to watch a series based on real events – or, in the case of Paramount+’s Happy Face (from Thursday 20 March), “inspired by a true life story” – and be confronted with an utterly mind-boggling fusion of fact and fiction.
First, the facts. This is a drama about a woman called Melissa Moore, daughter of the Happy Face killer. She is real (played here by Broadway stalwart Annaleigh Ashford) which means that, unfortunately, he is too. Keith Hunter Jesperson murdered at least eight women in the US in the 1990s, drawing smiley faces on the anonymous confessional letters he sent out to garner publicity for his crimes. Moore was frightened of her father growing up, especially when she witnessed him torture a set of kittens with inconceivable depravity, later finding their dead bodies. Moore revealed the truth on popular TV talk show Dr Phil – a decision that eventually led to a career in the world of true crime-based entertainment. In some ways, this is Moore bringing the jaw-dropping story of her own life to the screen: Happy Face is based on her 2009 memoir as well as a 2018 podcast series about her experiences (she is also an executive producer on this show).
But, in many other ways, it absolutely isn’t. When we meet the empathetic and unassuming Moore, she is working as a makeup artist on the fictional Dr Greg Show. One day, the eponymous talkshow host (David Harewood) receives a phone call from Jesperson (Dennis Quaid), who demands to speak to Moore, forcing her to out herself as his daughter. He wants to reveal his responsibility for another murder, but only to Moore – in person. She believes he’s lying to get her attention (likely), but Greg’s workaholic producer Ivy tells her she owes it to the victim to visit him and extract as much information as possible.
This – as far as I can tell – didn’t happen, and this strange mixture of reality and total fantasy makes it difficult to invest in Happy Face’s half-truths. Even weirder is that despite never shying away from the hellish details of Jesperson’s crimes, the show’s vibe is jarringly soapy and light-hearted, with Moore’s idyllic home life rendered in sunny soft-focus and even her relationship with her serial killer father saturated in sickly sentimentality at points.
Even weirder, however, is this show’s attitude to the true-crime industrial complex. Once Moore’s identity is revealed, the Dr Greg production team proceed to brutally exploit her like the professionals they are. Ivy guilt trips Moore into talking to her dad – who clearly poses a danger to Moore’s family – in the name of content, then bullies her into doing a TV interview herself, during which Greg hurls all sorts of egregious accusations at her (later, a vulture-like agent circles in the hope of landing a book deal). Initially, I thought this might be a meta satire of an industry that milks private pain for entertainment, but by the end it is clear Happy Face is no such thing.
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So what is it then? Well, the fictional thriller component – which gets wilder and more murder mystery-like as Moore and Ivy delve into Jesperson’s claims – is certainly gripping. It’s chilling too: Quaid is deeply creepy as the compulsively gurning Jesperson (that’s The Parent Trap ruined for ever). But does this pick-and-mix twist on the real-life crime drama have anything meaningful to say about the genre’s malignancy – or even its healing properties? Truth be told, I really don’t think so.
