‘Happy Face’ EP on If Keith’s Heart Attack Was ‘Coincidental,’ Plans for Season 2 & More

[WARNING: This post contains MAJOR spoilers from Season 1 of Happy Face.]

Season 1 of Happy Face ended on a cliffhanger that left the door open for a potential second season, and showrunner Jennifer Cacicio is ready to tell more of the story if she gets the chance.

“I am putting together a Season 2 pitch, and hopefully we’ll get a renewal,” Cacicio told TV Insider.

The show ended with Melissa’s (Annaleigh Ashford) husband Ben (James Wolk) getting a threatening call from her father, serial killer Keith Jesperson (Dennis Quaid), from behind bars. Behind Melissa’s back, Ben had taken a hit out on Keith, and although he eventually had second thoughts, the plan was put into motion. Keith had a heart attack before the shanking happened, but called Ben up to tell him that he knew all about what he was plotting.

The timing of the heart attack was almost too perfect, as Keith dropped to the ground just as a fellow inmate was approaching him with a knife. However, Cacicio confirmed that it was a “coincidental” medical issue … to an extent (Keith actually did have a heart attack while the show was being written, and he survived.)

“In my mind, I had talked to a couple of doctors about this, and they said if you’re close to a heart attack and you’re already having health issues, that in a moment of extreme stress, it can trigger the event,” Cacicio explained. “So that was my thinking. If you go back over the season, there’s a few times he’s clutching his arm and saying he has heartburn and stuff, so we placed that in there to lead up to it. The idea is that he already has some health issues going on, then he sees the knife, he knows what’s happening, and it kind of triggers this event.”

Scroll down for our full chat with the EP, where she breaks down her plans for Season 2 and reveals whether Melissa has closure with her dad. Plus, which parts of the story were actually pulled from Melissa Moore’s (whose dad is Keith IRL) life?

The storyline with Ben and Keith sets up the potential for more story to tell. Did you have Season 2 ideas in your mind when you ended it with that phone call?

Jennifer Cacicio: Yeah, definitely. I just had a Zoom with Melissa the other day kind of picking her brain about the different cases she’s worked on and everything that’s happened with her dad … every single time I talk to her I’m just like, ‘God, there’s a wealth of material here.’ The story just keeps unfolding. He’s still trying to connect with her, she still has other people, like third parties, reaching out with her and trying to communicate with her for him. I have people reaching out to me trying to talk to me. It’s kind of unfolding, and a lot of the cases that she covers, he finds a way to try and kind of get involved, as well. There’s a lot in her podcast and in her memoir that we haven’t even touched on. She’s really had this wild life and I feel like, definitely, it has legs. There’s a lot of different directions we could go. I’ve always seen it as a multi-season show, definitely.

It’s so interesting that he’s still reaching out to her in real life, because on the show, their final scene in the hospital was such a powerful scene. Should the show end here, do you think the character of Melissa had closure from that conversation?

I think so. With the real Melissa, what she shared with me is that it’s cyclical. At times she feels like she gets a little bit of closure and she feels good about her choice to not have any contact with him and she’s moved on. And then something will happen or she’ll get another letter or she’ll find something out. Your life changes and your mood changes. Then she’ll just have a period where she second-guesses that. I know when her mom passed away a couple of years ago, she really was considering talking to her dad again because she wanted to hear more stories about her mom and she kind of felt like he was the holder to those stories. But ultimately she decided not to. I think it kind of ebbs and flows. I would be okay with [it ending this way]. I feel like this season closed the loop. I think she got closure for this story. I think when she walks out of there, she has every intention to never see him again. Of course, if we had a Season 2, that wouldn’t be the case.

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Right, maybe she had closure in that moment, but there’s this whole secret that’s being kept from her [about Ben taking a hit out on her father]. How do you think Melissa would have reacted if she knew about that?

It’s definitely something I would want to explore. Obviously, that did not happen in real life. That’s just something that developed in the writer’s room and it was just too juicy not to do. Honestly, I think her ex-husband and her current husband, they have no love for Keith. All he’s done is torture their wife. I think she would be really upset, though. I think deep down she does still love him. So there’s that element, and then there’s this other element of, the character Melissa … she married the good guy. She married the opposite of her dad. Or so she thinks. But now this guy is capable of something pretty dark, even though the motivation is to protect his family, it does make you wonder if that would change the way she feels about him.

Do you have an idea in your mind or do you hope to explore in a second season how exactly Keith found out about the hit?

Yes. I think so. I don’t know how far we would get into that, but definitely, Keith’s revenge against Ben would be a story and we’d probably learn how he found out.

Are there any other characters from the first season you wish you’d gotten to explore a little bit more or maybe want to explore more in Season 2?

One of the characters I would love to see more of is Jillian, who plays his girlfriend, his quirky girlfriend. The actress is Jenn Lyon. I just think she brings such a different energy to the show. A little bit of humor, a little bit of quirkiness, and I just think she’s such a great actress. And I think we’d probably see more of Melissa’s mom in a Season 2, definitely. I’d also like to see, possibly, more of her brother. I really love the relationship between them. And, you know, a character that was sort of mentioned but we never meet in Season 1 is their sister, their youngest sister who you see in flashbacks. So I always had in the back of my mind that she would appear in Season 2 and change up the dynamic.

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Melissa’s podcast has a Season 2 that dives into another similar story, and the show ends with her getting her own true crime segment. Have you thought about weaving that second podcast story into another season of the show?

I’m exploring a couple of different ideas. I don’t want to say which one I’m leaning towards. She’s worked on so many fascinating and well-known true crime cases, so there’s almost a wealth of ways you can go. But I think it would be similar where it’s really about the emotional story, especially the family and the way the family is affected would be a big part of Season 2. Keith’s revenge on Ben would affect everybody. But there would be some sort of fresh case that Melissa’s covering as a journalist and she kind of gets pulled into it, and we’d have to pull Keith into it somehow as well.

I feel like some people are maybe unsure about how much of the story was real and how much you put into it. Can you clarify what was actually real?

All the flashbacks are pretty much real. Melissa did used to be a makeup artist and then she’s also worked on talk shows, so we kind of just smushed those together. Basically, we have her rights, we do not have the rights … we actually do have her kids rights, but I never really wanted to write about her kids. I wanted to kind of protect their privacy. We don’t get too far into Keith’s victims. I was really interested in Melissa’s emotional story, but I always knew that the show needed a little bit more of an engine to make it a drama with suspense and thrills and stuff. The podcast is so emotionally, you know, provocative, but it’s not really … there’s no plot, really. Keith did confess to another crime in the ‘90s that another man was in prison for and then it turned out that Keith actually didn’t do it. So when I read that, I was like, ‘Oh, Okay I’m going to take this story and I’m going to make a fictionalized version of it so I have complete creative freedom, I’m not messing with anyone’s real life.” The details of the real murders that we do mention are true. I understand it’s a little bit of a hodgepodge, so some viewers are put off by that, but I think it was really just … it’s really about staying true to the spirit of the show and Melissa’s story and Melissa’s journey. In that sense, it’s completely true. It wasn’t ever meant to be a play-by-play of exactly what her life is. Anything that was fictionalized was pulled from the world of reality and built off of from there.