The Thing About Pam Review: Renée Zellweger Is Entertainingly Evil in Uneven True Crime Limited Series

The Thing About Pam, NBC's new six-episode limited drama series about the bizarre case of Pam Hupp, is obviously heavily influenced by Fargo. Hupp, a convicted murderer from Missouri whose unbelievable story was the subject of a popular 2019 true crime podcast also called The Thing About Pam, is a character straight out of a Coen Brothers movie, a greedy Midwestern sociopath whose outward ordinariness hides a diabolical nature. She's played by Renée Zellweger in prosthetic makeup and, controversially, a "fat suit." The show has an ironic, detached tone and plays as a grotesque dark comedy about dimwitted criminals and incompetent law enforcement. 

As I mentioned, it feels more than anything else like Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen's 1996 crime dramedy masterpiece. But Fargo only claimed to be a true story. The Thing About Pam is about real people and real murders that happened in the recent past, which makes it a bit hard to stomach. When you think about how Betsy Faria was brutally murdered and her husband Russ served three years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, the show's arch tone feels impudent. That being said, the tone does work when it's being directed at the failures of the justice system that allowed Russ Faria to be convicted and Pam Hupp to not even be a suspect until years later.

If you don't know anything about the case, which I did not before I watched the show, The Thing About Pam earns its legal thriller structure. It is an extraordinary story with twists, turns, reversals of fortune, and stunningly bad choices by police and prosecutors. It will have you googling to find out if this could really have happened — and it did. Just after Christmas in 2011, Russ Faria (played by True Detective's Glenn Fleshler) came home to find his wife Betsy (Katy Mixon) dead. He called 911 and said she had killed herself. But she had been stabbed 55 times, including in the back, and Russ was charged with her murder. The police and the district attorney (Judy Greer) ignored evidence that pointed to Betsy's friend Pam Hupp, the last person to see her alive and offerer of convenient evidence and testimony implicating Russ, and as of four days before the murder, the beneficiary of Betsy's life insurance policy. This is a true story, and that's only the start of how crazy it gets. It was a national news story that was covered on NBC's true crime institution Dateline in TV and podcast form for years, but the story was niche enough — and twisty enough — that I'll stop describing it there. This is a news story you don't want spoiled.

The show was produced by NBC News Studios, a division of NBC News that makes high-end documentaries as well as scripted projects that adapt NBC News docs and podcasts, in partnership with Blumhouse Television, which also makes scripted and documentary TV. They took a blended approach for The Thing About Pam. The show is basically a fictionalized Dateline episode, featuring full-on Dateline narration by correspondent Keith Morrison, who hosted the podcast. It uses many of Dateline's narrative techniques, like cliffhangers before commercial breaks, and Morrison's distinctive folksy/macabre narration. Rarely does a true crime documentary beget an entertainment adaptation quite like this, where it's the same people making both. It gives a lot of ammo to people who accuse the true crime genre of exploiting real pain for entertainment. 

5.5

The Thing About Pam

Like

• A compelling story that's impossible to stop watching
• Strong performances across the board
• When the ironic tone works it works well

Dislike

• The ironic tone is off-putting at times
• The hair and make-up is terrible

The show's droll faux-documentary style is a perfect fit for some moments and not at all for others. The best parts of the show are the ones that expose the jaw-dropping arrogance and incompetence of the overmatched police and district attorney working the case. The DA, Leah Askey (not her name in real life), who's perfectly played with spiteful ineptitude by Judy Greer, is so unwilling to admit that she's wrong about Russell Faria that she will lie, withhold evidence, and stack the deck in her favor to get her way. And the judge (Heather Magee), her former high school classmate, is in cahoots with her against Faria's defense attorney Joel Schwartz (a charismatic Josh Duhamel), a city slicker from St. Louis. The things they do to make sure Russell Faria goes to jail and Pam Hupp does not are so outlandish you have to laugh. Faria is not laughing, though, and the most emotionally affecting moments of the show are between him and his stepdaughter Mariah (Gideon Adlon), who doesn't want to believe that the man she considers her father could have done this to her mother and doesn't trust her mom's friend Pam.     

Which brings us to Zellweger's performance. As Pam Hupp, she's so malicious that she's hilarious. She's constantly slurping from a giant cup of soda as she manipulates everyone around her. She has a bottomless well of seething resentment. She wants it all, and doesn't want anyone else to have anything. Zellweger doesn't play her as a misunderstood woman driven by circumstance to do bad things, she plays her as a cartoonishly evil energy vampire, which admittedly is a welcome change from true crime adaptations that excuse their criminal's misdeeds (Inventing Anna, to name one recent example). She's fun to watch, even if the character is one-dimensional and intentionally annoying. Zellweger has always been great at playing villains — Roxie Hart in Chicago is one of her signature roles — and it's easy to see why she was drawn to this unconventional femme fatale, even if it is a total curveball to follow up an Oscar win (her last role before this was Judy) with a pulpy broadcast show. 

The makeup choices are harder to understand. No matter how you feel about the fraught issue of actresses wearing fat suits, the prosthetics on The Thing About Pam don't pass muster. From the cheekbones up, Pam is unmistakably Renée Zellweger. From the nose down, she looks almost animatronic. Her plastery prosthetics conjure up memories of White Chicks. Her wig is stiff and obvious. It's so bad I almost wondered if the screeners I watched were waiting on some digital touch-ups to make the hair and makeup look passable. It's not just Zellweger's hair and makeup, either — Glenn Fleshler's wig is so bad that it feels like it might be on purpose. His painted-on hair is a borderline narrative flaw, as it feels like the show is making fun of and undermining a sympathetic character, especially early on in the show, when the ironic tone is at its most jarring. 

Even though The Thing About Pam has significant flaws, it is compulsively watchable. Every scene ends in a way that makes you want to keep watching, and it's paced well and doesn't spread its story out over too many hours. The real-life story is so gobsmackingly insane that it would be interesting to watch a show about it even if the acting wasn't this good. And when the Coen Brothers-inspired tone works, it's deliciously satisfying. But then you remember that this entertainingly stranger-than-fiction story wouldn't exist if innocent people hadn't died, and you feel little queasy.

Premieres: Tuesday, March 8 at 10/9c on NBC; Streaming the day after on Peacock
Who's in it: Renée Zellweger, Josh Duhamel, Judy Greer, Katy Mixon, Glenn Fleshler
Who's behind it: Jenny Klein (writer/showrunner), Scott Winant (director), Renée Zellweger (executive producer)
For fans of: True crime — specifically Dateline, movie stars in bad prosthetic makeup
How many episodes we watched: 4 out of 6