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From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Happy Face season 1
Date: Mon, 26 May 2025 20:53:49 -0000 (UTC)
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I finally finished Happy Face season 1, which I watched Showtime.

It was made for Pee+. American production based in Vancouver, including
location scenes supposed to be in Texas.

I liked the cast a lot. The plotting held up with some major weaknesses.

The show overcame my main concern, that I'd be unable to suspend
disbelief that nice guy Dennis Quaid could play Keith Jesperson,
a serial killer and rapist.

Oh, you WILL HATE Dennis Quaid.

The supporting cast was excellent. Damon Gupton did a nice job as
Elijah, the man coerced into making a false confession to rape and
murder decades earlier because a black man as the perpetrator in the
crime against his sympathetic white girlfriend simplified obtaining a
conviction. However, police ignored good reasons to question the
timeline in the theory of the crime they built.

David Harewood was quite good as the obsequious sleazy talk show
host Dr. Greg, who could get anybody being interviewed to cry at an
appropriately dramatic moment. Yeah, you could see Maury Povich;
he wasn't doing Dr. Phil.

Most of the plot moved along by handing in a clue, following it, then
following the next clue. There was misdirection but no dead ends.
Annaleigh Ashford's Melissa wasn't quite as perceptive as the audience
was supposed to believe.

Once it became clear that Keith confessed falsely to the murder Elijah
was convicted of, Melissa and Ivy and Tyler had so little trouble
following the trail of clues that revealed the true perpetrator, it's a
wonder that the police never tripped over these leads in the first
place.

There were a number of things I didn't like. While we know that master
criminals have no trouble manipulating events from behind bars, it was
not possible to suspend disbelief as to how much power Keith had. While
committing the crimes he was convicted of, he didn't seem like much of a
mastermind. In the finale, his claim to Melissa that he kept tokens of
his crimes because he intended to confess did not ring true, and that he
wanted to help Melissa become a star was the reason behind his
contacting the Dr. Greg show in the first place and the false
confession, really didn't work.

Gillian, the serial killer sycophant, wasn't particularly bright and it
was hard to believe she could plant much of the evidence in support of
Keith's false confession. But the real problem was that it was an
important plot point that Melissa spotted Gillian's unique lipstick and
realized that Keith or Gillian (it turned out to be Keith) contacted
Joyce, Elijah's sister, convincing her to plant false evidence. But
then, there were no consequences at all, so why introduce the plot? The
evidence that exonnerated Elijah (he would be found actually innocent,
not just acquitted) was independent of any false evidence.

Of course the false evidence should have come to light and it really
should have threatened to screw up Elijah's case. Instead they kept the
false evidence hidden from Elijah's lawyer. Now, that really could have
backfired had the state figured out that the evidence was false.

I didn't care for the district attorney, said in a later episode not to
be corrupt, attempt to suborn a perjured statement from Keith to support
his unsupported public statement that Keith and Elijah had conspired.

Lastly, I didn't care for Ben getting conned into soliciting Keith's
murder. Were we supposed to believe Keith manipulated that? If Keith
hadn't had the near-fatal heart attack, exactly how was the stabbing
going to work?

I'd have preferred that it had ended but they set up plenty of plot to
explore if another season is ordered, which hasn't happened yet.