Dennis Quaid Is a Convincingly Creepy ‘Happy Face’ Killer, but Paramount’s True Crime Drama Misses the Mark: TV Review

variety.com:

Alison Herman TV Critic It’s often said that television is a writers’ medium, but that’s because scripts are a delivery device for the format’s true lifeblood: plot.

However interesting a project’s themes may be, it requires structure and momentum to propel the action multiple episodes. So to develop the story of Melissa Moore (Annaleigh Ashford), the author, podcaster, and adult daughter of so-called “Happy Face Killer” Keith Jesperson (Dennis Quaid), into a series, showrunner Jennifer Cacicio (“Your Honor,” “Sexy Beast”) and executive producers Robert and Michelle King (“The Good Fight,” “Elsbeth”) couldn’t just look backward.

When Melissa was a teenager, she learned her father had killed at least eight women across the country while working as a truck driver.

As an adult, Cacicio and the Kings must populate Melissa’s present with more urgent conflicts, a necessary strategy that can nonetheless cloud the weightiest ideas of the resulting series, straightforwardly titled “Happy Face.” The Kings are best known as masters of the modern procedural, packing religious allegory (“Evil”) or political scheming (“The Good Wife”) into sub-50-minute boxes that feel elegantly abundant — never overstuffed.