The only thing scarier than a serial killer is a serial killer with a family.
Not necessarily because the members of that family are apt to be killers themselves, but because of how well the murderer must have been able to hide their violent tendencies from the people they settled down with, who thought they were safe. Happy Face, Peacock’s crime series that is “based on a true life story,” follows the daughter of a convicted serial killer as she is forced to publicly confront her family’s past in order to potentially rectify a wrongful conviction.
Melissa Moore (Annaleigh Ashford) has never gone public with the shameful truth that she is the daughter of notorious murderer Keith Jesperson (Dennis Quaid doing a Heath Ledger Joker impression), even though she works as a makeup artist for the Dr. Phil-esque talk show Dr. Greg, whose audience is rabid for any and all true-crime drama.
Her facade is torn down one day when Jesperson contacts the show, offering information on a victim of his who has never been identified, but only if Melissa agrees to talk with him. Melissa is forced to reveal to the world that she is Jesperson’s daughter, upending her home life and launching her into a mission to find Jesperson’s victim and thereby save another erroneously convicted man from death row.
It feels weird to call a show about this sort of subject matter “too serious,” and yet Happy Face’s doleful rehashing of its subject’s very bad deeds and the capital-T Trauma resulting from them make many of the first season’s episodes feel like a chore. It’s a potent plot, but it’s much too dreary, probably because much of it is true. Keith Jesperson is real, as is Melissa Moore, whose Oprah appearance, podcast, and 2008 memoir Shattered Silence provide the backbone for the series.
It would be difficult to take too many creative liberties with the tone of such a show without maybe seeming disrespectful, and that’s fine. But watching the agony parade of Ashford looking miserable while her husband (James Wolk, whose progressively growing eye bags deserve a makeup Emmy of their own) criticizes her for prioritizing work over her family, or her coworker, hungry reality TV producer Ivy (Winning Time‘s Tamera Tomakili), pushes her into increasingly more uncomfortable and dangerous situations starts to feel monotonous. I was hoping for a little more juice from a series produced by Michelle and Robert King, whose procedurals The Good Wife, Evil, and Elsbeth have a more entertainingly tilted perspective on this formula.
The most interesting thing about Happy Face, aside from its roots in reality, is the bluntness with which it examines the commodification of true crime—a trend that has been growing for the past few years, ever since some skeptics started looking at the genre’s popularity and wondering why we do this to ourselves.
A group of high school bullies glom onto Melissa’s unpopular daughter Hazel (Khiyla Aynne), calling themselves “murderinos.” Melissa herself is inarguably exploited by everyone but her husband—her boss, her friends, her coworkers, her father, even her daughter pressure her into doing all the things she swore never to do in order to keep her peace, though even that message is somewhat garbled by the end of the season. Is it better for someone like her to expose herself, knowing it could bring justice to the other victims? The show ultimately comes down on one side, after spending most of its season exploring the other.
Happy Face treads a very wobbly line and occasionally stays on track. It critiques true-crime fandom while also offering up more of the same to its already rabid audience. It’s an examination of victimhood and exploitation, while also never quite turning that eye upon itself for long enough to get at any true meaning. Maybe if Happy Face was anything other than Very Serious about its subject matter, these moral lessons wouldn’t seem so confused, but, as it is, the show doesn’t have a whole lot else to offer—more interested in having its cake and stabbing it, too.
