This Saturday, September 9, M6 is broadcasting the first episodes of “The Thing About Pam”, a mini-series hosted by Renée Zellweger which tells the story of a terrible news story that shook America. Our review…
This Saturday, September 9 from 9:10 p.m., M6 is broadcasting the first 3 episodes of The Thing About Pam, an event mini-series with Renée Zellweger which returns to the sordid, but true, story of Pam Hupp. The year is 2011. After spending an evening with friends, Russ Faria returns home and discovers the lifeless body of his wife, Betsy. Although he continues to maintain his innocence, he will be sentenced to life in prison for the crime. Very quickly, her best friend, Pam Hupp, becomes suspicious in her turn…
Who is it with?
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Judy, Renée Zellweger is the star of The Thing About Pam, where she plays Pam Hupp, a real-life serial killer mother. For the occasion, the actress had to wear a “fat suit” (magnifying costume) and prosthetics to fit as closely as possible to his character.
She opposite Judy Greer, seen in 30 Years or Nothing and Arrested Development, and Josh Duhamel (Love, Simon, Las Vegas) who respectively play the prosecutor Leah Askey and Joel Schwartz, Russ Faria’s lawyer. The latter is also played by Glenn Fleshler (Billions). Finally Katy Mixon, an actress that you discovered in American Housewife plays Betsy Faria.
It’s worth checking out ?
News items are definitely an inexhaustible source of ideas for screenwriters. After Dirty John, American Crime Story, or Mindhunter, to name a few, it’s Renee Zellweger’s turn to offer us The Thing About Pam.
This 6-episode mini-series adapted from the eponymous podcast returns to the sordid story of Pam Hupp, a greedy sociopath from the depths of the United States, who, beneath her appearance of an ordinary housewife, is in reality a manipulative and without mercy.
It’s 2011, just after the Christmas holidays. After a role-playing evening with friends, Russ Faria returns home to find his wife, Betsy dead. He then calls 911, panicked, and explains to them that she committed suicide.
But very quickly, investigators discovered that she had been stabbed 55 times, making the theory of suicide impossible. For the police and the district attorney, there is no doubt: it is Russ who is guilty of the murder.
Convinced of having caught the culprit, they will ignore all the clues which differ from their version, even those which point to Pam Hupp, the last person to have seen her alive and the sole beneficiary of her life insurance, as the ideal suspect.
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With its many twists and turns, The Thing About Pam offers us a vision of a sometimes corrupt judicial system which seeks to find the ideal suspect, even if it means letting the real criminal slip away.
The prosecutor, Leah Askey, brilliantly played by Judy Greer, refuses to admit that she was wrong about Russell Faria and does not hesitate to conceal evidence and play Pam’s game to achieve her ends. It is moreover this aspect of the series, which only arrives in episode 2, which is worth the detour, as the investigation carried out by the police seems ludicrous.
A sort of poor man’s Fargo, the series unfortunately struggles to find its footing. Where the Coen brothers’ film adopted an offbeat tone, The Thing About Pam remains too classic in a destabilizing in-between, in which it is never really humorous nor really dramatic. The voice-over, à la Jane the Virgin and Desperate Housewives, doesn’t help this feeling.
For her part, Renée Zellweger sounds false in the role of Pam. Probably his fault fat suit and her numerous facial prosthetics that makeup artists used to make her look like the real protagonist.
An outfit that almost makes her look like she came straight out of the movie FBI: Fake Blondes Undercover (which is clearly not a compliment). It’s a shame not to have used an actress who already looked like Pam, or simply to have chosen to use the real physique of Renée Zellweger, counting on her talent as an actress to convince us that she is Pam Hupp.
In short, despite its few flaws, The Thing About Pam is a gripping mini-series, which, thanks to precisely distilled cliffhangers, manages to captivate us until the last episode.