5 d. ago
Happy Face: this drama about a serial killer’s daughter is so mind
At times, this true-crime drama feels like a meta satire of an industry that milks private pain for entertainment. It is, however, no such thing 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 confron...
Events
