Dennis Quaid in Paramount+ Serial Killer Drama

Take eight episodes for what would be a pilot in more efficient hands – and set up a second season that is somehow even less necessary – Paramount +’s Happy face fluctuations between hypocritical and hypocritical, the exploitative tropics of true crime exclude and then embody the worst instincts of the genre, although nothing special can offer as compensation.

It is a show that at least pays the lip service to do something interesting, but there are too many intellectual hurdles that cannot clarify.

Created by Jennifer Cacicio (Your honor), The series describes itself as “inspired by a true life story”.

In this case, the story is that of Melissa Moore, which the shame, the daughter of a notorious serial killer for an autobiography, a podcast, the correspondent gig with Dr. Phil and more TV appearances than a reasonable person could count.

The “inspiration” driven by this true story is to take Melissa’s real life and to transplant a completely fictional, ordinary procedural line of the minge, with results that apparently do not seem to have unsettled anyone in the creative team as they should.

Melissa lives in Washington or somewhere moisture with her boring banker husband (James Wolks Ben), her teenage daughter (Khiyla Aynnes Hazel) and the nine-year-old son (Benjamin Macke’s Max). On Hazel’s 15th birthday, a strangely subordinate card arrives, the hazel flips out and Melissa flips out because she knows that her father, Keith Hunter Jeskers (Dennis Quaid), a notorious serial killer who serves several life penalties for the murder of eight women. By the way, Ben is the only person in Melissa’s life who knows something about her father.

Melissa calls and leaves an angry news for her alienated father and tells him that he should stay away from her family. Then she works as a makeup artist The Dr. Greg Show, A manipulative self -help series that proves this Happy face is afraid of the review of Dr. Phil as a malignant serial killer. Keith responds to the call by to Dr. Greg (David Harewood) himself and Melissa is forcing on national television with predictably stigmatizing answers.

Keith presses Melissa’s actual empathy and Dr. Greg’s insincere television empathy by teasing that he was also responsible, but was never attributed for a ninth murder – a crime for which an innocent man (Damon Guptons Elijah) is to be carried out in Texas. So Dr. Greg Melissa and producer Ivy (Tamera Tomakili) to Texas to get answers with occasional support from the Gackling Keith. In the meantime, Melissa’s family falls apart.

On the surface, Happy face is in the protests in relation to all possibilities that differ from the numerous true crimes. It makes fun of so -called murderinos, through a group of common teenagers who suddenly stick to Hazel when it becomes famous, although it doesn’t make much fun. It shows mocked how Dr. Gregwho offer a soulless Katharsis to a audience, which really only wants to roll into inhumanity, but not for long. It mocks to people who buy art produced by serial murderers as if Google after “How do I buy Keith Jeskers Art?” I won’t go through the roof after this series.

Over and over again, Happy face Has the characters say that the mistake of the genre is its fetish -fitting fixation on the murderers and not on the real victims – the innocent families of the murderers (and maybe a bit, the actual victims and their families) – the murderers of the murderer). Everything is fine and good to repeat: “We are a show about victims and no further opportunity to grap a murderer.” But in Happy faceIn addition to Melissa, the victims are fictionalized like their families, and they feel in a TV show that are played by decent but generally unforgettable guest stars. Keith Jeskers with the nickname “The Happy Face Killer” is completely real and is played by a film star that the series offers in posters. He killed at least eight people, and none of these people are honored with names or humanized, presumably because the show realized that this would be rough and exploitative – as if deleting their identity is somehow less disgusting.

Melissa is real, but to use the reality of her life as an excuse to tell an ordinary procedural story in the project style, is bizarre, because everything in this story is padded and generally and not interesting on human or narrative levels. In order to express the story, Melissa’s family became various domestic action lines such as “Will Ben get an action from the bank?” And – I can’t emphasize enough how much I wish I would invent – “Will hazelnut wax or shave, which is apparently a traumatizing amount of pubic hair?”

And I will repeat that these are stories that Happy face Use a serial killer as a vehicle to explore. On the way it offers an insight that the children of serial murderers feel their own sense of responsibility and their own trauma feeling what I am sure and I am sure that I feel sympathy. But it is not a high bar of character development.

Ashford is very good and swings her high, breathy voice and slightly injured emotionality to provide a very nice version of the real Melissa. Quaid is more subtle than he is The substanceBut despite all the express request of the show, they do not talorize Keith, but still makes him look smart, artistically gifted and able to lead stroke and romantic attraction not Valorization. Harewood is very good in one terrifying scene that the hollow of the Dr. Phil expresses, but in general the show in this area has no teeth. Teach Grant has sacrificed the other sincerely effective scene of the series as the son of one of Keith’s, a scene that inevitably does something stupid and unplausible from Ben (Wolk is completely wasted).

Although the execution is never great, the problem with Happy face is generally one of the conception. You can make Fox Lost sonWhere a false serial killer and his fake son come together fake crimes together. Or you can do Monster: Whatever the hunky real serial killer Ryan Murphy has. But you can’t do any Monster: Whatever the hunky real serial killer Ryan Murphy has Spinoff, in which Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers work together to combat a wrong crime. Well, you can. Happy face essentially. You just shouldn’t.