Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 21, 2025
The first two episodes of Paramount+’s new true-crime drama Happy Face premiered this week. Based on the real story of Melissa Moore — the daughter of serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson, aka the “Happy Face Killer” — the series stars Annaleigh Ashford as Melissa Jesperson-Moore, a make-up artist for a daytime talk show, The Dr. Greg Show. Melissa learned in high school that her father (Dennis Quaid) was the Happy Face Killer — a long-haul trucker who murdered at least eight women during the 1990s. A notorious attention-seeker, Jesperson signed his anonymous confessions to media and law enforcement with smiley faces, earning his nickname.
In the series, The Dr. Greg Show is planning an episode on the Happy Face Killer. To connect with his estranged daughter — who changed her name after learning the truth — Keith dangles a bombshell: there was a ninth victim, but he’ll only confess to Melissa. The revelation puts her in an impossible position. Investigating the claim would mean sacrificing her family’s anonymity, but ignoring it could lead to the execution of Elijah (Damon Gupton), a Black man on death row since 1995, falsely convicted of the ninth victim’s murder.
In the second episode, Melissa (unsurprisingly) comes forward publicly on The Dr. Greg Show to reveal her identity. Her decision is partly driven by the Texas district attorney’s smug insistence on moving forward with Elijah’s execution, despite mounting evidence that he’s innocent.
There’s no shortage of true crime in today’s media landscape (see also Hulu’s Good American Family), and while I’ll concede that Ashford — who deftly played Paula Jones in Ryan Murphy’s Clinton-era American Crime Story — is solid in the role, the series itself feels meandering and thematically underdeveloped. It gestures toward intergenerational trauma but doesn’t quite build anything meaningful around it.
Quaid is fine — smug and hard to stomach — but he leans a little too heavily into Jesperson’s performative menace. The rest of the cast — Tamera Tomakili as a producer, David Harewood as Dr. Greg, and James Wolk as Melissa’s husband — barely register beyond stock character territory. Melissa’s teenage daughter, Hazel (Khiyla Aynne), gets her own subplot involving an awkward attempt to use her family’s dark history to gain popularity with mean girls at school. It plays like filler.
The series, which is based on Moore’s podcast and a co-written autobiography, fictionalizes the ninth victim. In her podcast, Moore did investigate potential additional victims based on confessions her father made. In reality, Jesperson claimed responsibility for as many as 160 murders — mostly sex workers and transients — but only eight have been confirmed. The series’ flashbacks track with Moore’s real-life upbringing, but the present-day storyline, the bulk of the show, is wholly fictional.
I’m struggling with the series so far. Creator Jennifer Cacicio seems intent on avoiding the usual true-crime trap —centering the story on the killer rather than his victims — but I’m not convinced that shifting the focus to the killer’s daughter is that much better. Melissa Moore is unquestionably an emotional victim of her father’s crimes, but the eight confirmed victims of the Happy Face Killer remain largely faceless, while the ninth is a fictional stand-in. The show might have struck a better balance by weaving in the real women’s lives and memories—giving space to their stories, not just their trauma, and making their humanity as central as Moore’s.
Even putting that aside, the show just isn’t that compelling, despite a strong performance from Ashford and a showy one from Quaid. I almost prefer the sensationalistic approach of Good American Family because at least it’s honest about its trashiness. Unfortunately, Happy Face doesn’t quite work thematically or exploitatively — it’s stuck somewhere in between and ultimately fizzless.
