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Perhaps, like politicians’ careers, all mental property should ultimately finish in failure. You start in a single medium – a viral video on social media, maybe, which brings your story to the eye of the plenty and the makers of a podcast; then on to a streamed drama or documentary, perhaps knocking out a e-book on the topic as you go. However ultimately it hits a wall. The brand new translation doesn’t work, it’s working on empty, it doesn’t seize curiosity, the second has handed. Folks get bored, they transfer on, and that’s the tip of your IP’s journey.
The brand new true-crime drama Comfortable Face, created by Jennifer Cacicio and executive-produced by the mighty Robert and Michelle King (The Good Spouse, The Good Combat, Evil, Elsbeth), started life as a e-book – Shattered Silence, the 2009 autobiography of Melissa Moore, wherein she recounted her expertise because the daughter of the serial assassin Keith Hunter Jesperson. He was generally known as the Comfortable Face Killer, due to the smiley doodles he drew on quite a few attention-seeking letters to the media and authorities throughout his years of murdering a minimum of eight girls. He’s serving a life sentence in Oregon state penitentiary.
Moore appeared in an episode of the true-crime sequence Evil Lives Right here, adopted shortly after by a 12-part podcast about her father’s crimes and her childhood. Now, we have now an eight-part “impressed by” dramatisation, which retains the fundamental information the identical, however provides in fictional parts so the viewer by no means is aware of fairly what’s true and what isn’t, and subsequently how shocked or invested to be at any level. It makes for an unsatisfactory expertise even earlier than you have in mind the lacklustre script, flat performances and wild tonal variations, not to mention tackle the queasy query of how a lot the style typically, and this particularly, is exploiting the grief of victims’ households.
Annaleigh Ashford provides a charisma-free efficiency as Moore, who’s written as a blandly saintly survivor, racked with guilt about not doing extra to cease her father and now in search of – through an apparently invented subplot – to atone for her perceived sins. James Wolk does the very best he can with the little obtainable to him within the function of Ben, Melissa’s nearly equally saintly husband. There’s a teenage daughter who goes off the rails when she discovers who her grandad is (shoplifting, becoming a member of the flawed crowd and secretly contacting him in jail). After which there’s Dennis Quaid as Jesperson, whose innate edgy vibe may have been harnessed to nice impact, however who as a substitute slips into grinning caricature. He isn’t helped by the eternally one-note script.
Moore is working as a make-up artist on the remedy talkshow Dr Greg (performed by an uncharacteristically over-the-top David Harewood) when Jesperson will get in contact to say that he’ll confess to killing a ninth lady, Heather (Leah Jacksties) – however solely to his daughter and solely in individual. For a second, it appears as if Comfortable Face is about to proper itself and develop into an interrogation of our period’s more and more unhealthy obsession with true crime and our willingness to miss exploitation of the weak in pursuit of the following vicarious thrill. Dr Greg and his producer, Ivy (Tamera Tomakili), press Moore into contacting her father and showing on the present to “out” herself because the killer’s baby.
However this hope, regardless of every little thing the Kings did to seize the vagaries of the US authorized system with The Good Spouse and The Good Combat, is just not realised. The frustration recurs when Ivy and Melissa uncover that Heather’s boyfriend, a younger Black man, Elijah (performed by Damon Gupton), is weeks away from the dying penalty in Texas for her homicide, regardless of an absence of proof. That is ripe for an examination of systemic racism and corruption, however this isn’t fulfilled.
Though it turns into somewhat extra constant within the second half, Comfortable Face stays a weirdly soapy, at occasions saccharine, evocation of overcome trauma and the mawkish celebration of the braveness of victims and the survivors of horrible violence that patronises somewhat than honours them. The entire thing feels drained, shoddy and half-baked. However perhaps Jesperson will benefit from the additional consideration it can deliver him. One thing to assist break the monotony in jail. Smiley face.
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