In Paramount+’s Happy Face, all the murder happens in the past and off camera, but that doesn’t mean the people behind it aren’t trying to unnerve viewers with their relatively novel spin on true crime.

To be sure, it is true. The “Happy Face Killer” is real. Keith Hunter Jesperson (played by Dennis Quaid) is serving a life sentence for the murders of eight women and has confessed to the killing of many, many more. He also has a daughter, Melissa Moore (Annaleigh Ashford), whose devoted her life to working with the families of victims. But that, in many ways, is where the similarities between truth and TV began to part ways. The dramatization, which launched on March 20, leans as far away from serial killer tropes as possible, nixing reenactments of crimes and displays of violence for tense exchanges between a convict and his fraught daughter — introducing...