Deadline reports that Happy Face, the serial killer series starring Dennis Quaid and Annaleigh Ashford, has been cancelled by Paramount+ after just one season. As the show seemed to come and go with little fanfare earlier this year, this isn’t a huge surprise.
Happy Face was adapted from Melissa Moore’s 2018 podcast Happy Face and her 2009 autobiography Shattered Silence, which she co-wrote with M. Bridget Cook. At 15, Moore discovered that her beloved father was the prolific serial killer known as Happy Face. As an adult, she has changed her name and guarded her secret while her father has been serving life in prison.
Jumping off from Moore’s true-life story, the series follows Melissa (Ashford) and her incarcerated father, known as the Happy Face Killer (Quaid). After decades of no contact, he finally finds a way to force himself back into his daughter’s life. In a race against the clock, Melissa must find out if an innocent man is going to be put to death for a crime her father committed. Throughout, she discovers the impact her father had on his victims’ families and must face a reckoning of her own identity.
Our own Alex Maidy found Happy Face to be an entertaining series, but it struggles to distinguish between a true crime story and a crime procedural.
“Happy Face deals with the idea of duality and secrets but struggles with its identity as a series. Every true crime adaptation must take creative license with the material to increase the dramatic tension and entertainment value. Still, Happy Face sometimes feels like it is padding out the story that inspired the title with a plot taken from any conventional network procedural,” Maidy wrote. “It is far more interesting to see the connections and trauma shared between Keith Jesperson and Melissa Moore than watching Moore play amateur sleuth to solve a mystery. By the end of the series, the idea that this could be an ongoing drama about a podcasting detective who happens to be the daughter of a serial killer undermines the true story that it set out to tell. As good as Annaleigh Ashford and Dennis Quaid are in their respective roles, Happy Face would have worked better had it stuck to the true story and not this fictional and sensationalized one.” You can check out the rest of his review right here.
How do you feel about Happy Face getting cancelled?
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