Dennis Quaid is brilliantly creepy in true crime serial killer thriller Happy Face

This gripping Paramount+ series avoids most of the pitfalls surrounding true crime and podcast adaptations

On balance, the podcast revolution has been a negative for television. Whether it’s Homecoming on Prime Video (starring a confused Julia Roberts) or Dirty John on Netflix, hit podcasts have invariably made for watered-down TV. Something about the format’s chatty, informal style translates uneasily to the screen.

For that reason, true crime fans could be forgiven for having muted expectations for Paramount+’s Happy Face, a serial killer saga adapted from the 2018 podcast of the same name. But it pulls off the shift from non-fiction to drama surprisingly well – helped, perhaps, by the fact that it isn’t trying to do anything especially spectacular. The series tells a sensational story but with a minimum of fuss. Given the challenge posed by bringing podcasts to TV, simply to be stonkingly average (rather than weird and boring) is a victory in itself.

The big draw is Dennis Quaid. He is quietly chilling as Keith Hunter Jesperson – a real-life American-Canadian serial murderer dubbed the “Happy Face killer” in the 1990s because of the smiley faces with which he would sign his Jack the Ripper-style letters to the media. Quaid says he was initially “hesitant” about the part, explaining he didn’t want to “glorify” Jesperson. Yet he uncorks oodles of A-lister charm as a monster who projects dad-next-door vibes on the surface but whose wholesome smile is offset by the dead gravity pits of his eyes.

In the mid-1990s, Jesperson led an outwardly normal life as a hard-working trucker and doting dad to teenage daughter Melissa. Every so often, he would return home with a present for his little girl. What she didn’t know was that the gifts were his way of calming his roiling soul after he had taken another victim. He was using his innocent daughter as a coping mechanism as he raped and strangled numerous women across America.

Back in the present, Melissa (Annaleigh Ashford) has ended all contact with her now-imprisoned father. She has a career as a makeup artist on an Oprah-style daytime talk show hosted by the gregarious Dr Greg (a wonderfully fake and manipulative David Harewood). But her father continues to plague her with letters and calls from prison. When she rebuffs his latest attempt at contact on her daughter’s 15th birthday, he phones her employer and promises to reveal the identity of another, hitherto unidentified victim. There is a catch. He will share the details only if Melissa is involved in the process.

L-R Benjamin Mackey as Max Reed, James Wolk as Ben Reed, Khiyla Aynne as Hazel Reed and Annaleigh Ashford as Melissa Reed in ‘Happy Face’ (Victoria Will/Paramount+)

The real Jesperson is still alive. As are his victim’s families, who will presumably have mixed feelings about having their trauma turned into prime-time entertainment while the man who murdered their loved ones serves out his life sentence in Oregon (which does not have the death penalty). But Happy Face is, on the whole, respectful towards their suffering. The gruesome murders are largely glossed over. This is not one of those serial killer dramas that reveals an unhealthy fascination with the minutiae of the killings.

As was the case with the original podcast and Melissa Moore’s 2009 memoir, Shattered Silence, the true subject matter is Melissa’s relationship with her father. Ashford excels as an everyday mother and daughter, getting on with her quiet life in the suburbs while living always in the shadow of a dark secret. For his part, Quaid brings an overpowering Hollywood charisma as the father from hell. He is horribly watchable as an avuncular everyman whose cheesy dad banter papers over a bottomless well of evil.

It is a story crammed with surprises (provided you haven’t already binged the podcast). For instance, Melissa is shocked to discover that an innocent African-American Elijah (Damon Gupton) has been wrongly blamed for the Texas murder to which Jesperson has just confessed and languishes on death row. The exploitative nature of daytime TV is also unpacked when Melissa is encouraged to go on Dr Greg (Harewood plays a variation on the evil talk show host he portrayed in video game Alan Wake 2) to talk about the wrongful conviction in Texas. She has walked into a trap and is encouraged, despite her visible distress, to discuss her relationship with her father instead. Her personal tragedy has become meat for the masses.

That isn’t to say Happy Face doesn’t have its soapy moments. A subplot in which Melissa’s daughter becomes a minor celebrity among local true crime fans because of her bloody family history is presumably intended as a critique of the podcast industry and its obsession with dead women (the grislier the killings, the better). But the execution is hokey – as the resident mean girls pick on Hazel (Khiyla Aynne), it feels as if we’re sitting through a grim riff on High School Musical rather than a sensitive exploration of trauma and survival. But that’s just a quibble. By the standards of TV adaptations of hit podcasts, Happy Face can be considered a success. It stands on its own two feet as a drama and tells a grisly story without exploiting the victims or making the viewer feel cheapened or complicit merely by the act of watching. Disaster averted.