Happy Face is a Paramount+ true-crime drama created by Jennifer Cacicio and developed with Robert and Michelle King, the team behind The Good Wife and Evil. It adapts the podcast and memoir of Melissa Moore, the daughter of Keith Hunter Jesperson, the so-called Happy Face Killer, who murdered at least eight people in the early 1990s and taunted authorities with smiley-face-signed letters.
Annaleigh Ashford stars as Melissa, who has spent her adult life hiding her connection to her incarcerated father, played with unnerving control by Dennis Quaid. When Jesperson resurfaces claiming responsibility for an unsolved murder, Melissa is drawn back into his orbit and into a true-crime investigation that forces her to weigh a possibly innocent man's fate against her father's manipulations. James Wolk, Tamera Tomakili and David Harewood co-star.
The eight-episode series aired in the spring of 2025 and drew praise for its central performances even as critics were divided on its tone, which balanced domestic drama against serial-killer procedural. Grounded in Moore's real efforts to reckon with her father's crimes, Happy Face offers a victim-and-family-centered angle on a genre often fixated on its killers. It streams on Paramount+.
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Zahra Almailady is a wife and mom first but she discovered a passion for cinema and after graduating from UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television she dove into cinematography. Now Zahra writes movie reviews just for fun ad really enjoys it. Zahra loves reading, cooking, and windsurfing. She lives in New Zealand, with her husband two sons, and four cats.
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