You know the feeling: you’re watching a shocking docudrama about a toxic waste scandal, or the baseless prosecution of 555 sub-postmasters, or the fraudulent founder of a blood-testing biotech company, and you start thinking – did this all really happen? So you do some digging online. Usually, it turns out there has been a mild massaging of the truth in the name of narrative efficiency: a couple of characters conflated, a timeline slightly rejigged. Only very occasionally (once?) will a case of dramatic licence result in a hysterical media storm, a global debate about the ethics of dramatisation and Netflix being hit with a $170m lawsuit. And yet it is almost unheard of to settle down to watch a series based on real events – or, in the case of Paramount+’s Happy Face (from Thursday 20 March), “inspired by a true life story” – and be confronted with an utterly mind-boggling fusion of fact and fiction.
First, the facts. This is a drama about a woman called Melissa Moore, daughter of the Happy Face killer. She is real (played here by Broadway stalwart Annaleigh Ashford) which means that, unfortunately, he is too. Keith Hunter Jesperson murdered at least eight women in the US in the 1990s, drawing smiley faces on the anonymous confessional letters he sent out to garner publicity for his crimes. Moore was frightened of her father growing up, especially when she witnessed him torture a set of kittens with inconceivable depravity, later finding their dead bodies. Moore revealed the truth on popular TV talk show Dr Phil – a decision that eventually led to a career in the world of true crime-based entertainment. In some ways, this is Moore bringing the jaw-dropping story of her own life to the screen: Happy Face is based on her 2009 memoir as well as a 2018 podcast series about her experiences (she is also an executive producer on this show).
