Renée Zellweger’s ‘The Thing About Pam’ Is a Crime Story Without Pop: TV Review
07.03.2022 - 20:39
/ variety.com
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIt’s hard, at first, to see what drew Renée Zellweger to the lead role of “The Thing About Pam.”Zellweger, in an attempt to resemble the real-life convicted murderer Pam Hupp, forces herself to act through a shroud of body prosthetics. The show’s writers have stripped away subtext, dimming Zellweger’s sparky comic timing.
It’s only in the series’ third episode that a tie to Zellweger’s past work becomes clear: Rising to take the stand as a witness in a murder trial, Pam sees her name in lights. In the criminal-justice system, she’s found her own kind of stardom.“Chicago” this isn’t — that movie allowed Zellweger to be as shrewd and sharp as her character was callous and oblivious.
But “Pam,” a limited series based on Hupp’s true story, has this much in common with Zellweger’s famous musical role: It attempts to make points about the hungers and the vanities that drive people to kill. Pam, the show contends, found as a central figure in a 2011 murder case a way to matter; a prosecutor obsessed with finding a clear narrative, true or not, was all too willing to exploit her need.
Pam, a Missouri native, provided testimony in the murder trial of Russ Faria (played here by Glenn Fleshler). She had cultivated — obsessively, in this show’s telling — a friendship with Russ’ wife Betsy (Katy Mixon), who was terminally ill; when Betsy was found stabbed repeatedly, Pam provided testimony about Russ’ volatility and substance use, and secured after Russ’ conviction a trust for his daughters.
She’s helped along at ever turn by Judy Greer’s Leah Askey, a prosecutor who enlists Pam as an ally. The show makes intriguingly clear that Leah is out of her depth and the beneficiary of an ethos in unthinking
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