We’ll see,” in response to her refusal to be interviewed is a satisfying, if self-congratulating, moment. He guides The Thing About Pam along as Pam grows close to Betsy’s family, befriends the prosecutor trying Russ (Judy Greer), and then tries to brush off the ensuing media attention Morrison’s amused “No Dateline? Hmm. Dead wrong,” Morrison drawls, and viewers’ reactions to his smirking narration will probably vary depending on their familiarity with this Dateline tactic. Easy to judge the book by its cover … you’d be wrong. Betsy’s friend Pam Hupp was the last person to see her alive, and she points directly at Russ - around whom she spins accusations of abuse that the police accept without a second thought. Husband Russ (Glenn Fleshler) calls 911 in a sobbing panic, believing that she killed herself, but police who arrive on the scene think he’s acting “maybe too hysterical,” says Morrison, and dismiss it as “textbook spousal homicide.” Although Russ has no blood on his clothes, no signs of being in a struggle, and an alibi corroborated by four people, the cops refuse to consider another suspect. On December 27, 2011, Betsy Faria (Katy Mixon) is found in her home with dozens of stab wounds and a knife in her neck. Narration from broadcast journalist Keith Morrison, using the same highly flowery style and direct address he does on Dateline, sets up the story and then provides running commentary on it. Zellweger plays Hupp like a passive-aggressive Karen who strong-arms people to her will via a mixture of guilt trips and performative self-pity, but there’s a disconnect from the very beginning between Zellweger’s unconvincing performance and the series’ insistence that Hupp charmed and manipulated her small-town neighbors. She slurps on gigantic canteens of fountain soda, the scraping of the straw along the cup’s bottom both a pervasive irritant and a character-development shortcut. She squints so much that her eyes lose whatever interiority they might have reflected there is no real difference between her smile or her frown.
Her face nearly immobile under caked-on makeup and her physicality stilted by body prosthetics, Zellweger is simultaneously broadly cartoonish and blandly nonspecific.
Entertainment? Journalism? Whatever it is, Zellweger is a distraction. Of that trio, Zellweger is the most incongruous component in a performance that prioritizes caricature, and she calls into question what exactly The Thing About Pam is trying to accomplish with this extension of its existing IP.
Instead, this fictionalized miniseries is partially a meta-experiment in the newsmagazine format’s reliance on dramatic reenactments, partially NBC patting itself on the back for Dateline helping to release an innocent man, and partially Zellweger doing the most, and The Thing About Pam cannot sustain all three. The true story is wild, reflecting the laziness and corruption baked into the criminal-justice system all over this country, and to The Thing About Pam’s credit, its most refreshing quality is its refusal to downplay that ineptitude.īut The Thing About Pam isn’t a documentary because that approach has already been done for this story by NBC itself in a podcast of the same name and five Dateline episodes. For the majority of The Thing About Pam, the miniseries focuses on the death of Faria, for which Hupp was charged with first-degree murder in July 2021 - after framing Faria’s husband, Russ, who served a few years in prison thanks in part to Hupp’s cozy relationships with the detectives and district attorney assigned to the case.
#DATELINE EPISODES 2021 TRIAL#
The two-time Oscar winner stars as Pam Hupp, a Missouri woman currently serving a life sentence for one murder, awaiting trial in another, and suspected in one more. That is an actual line from my notes on The Thing About Pam, the NBC miniseries premiering tonight about the 2011 murder of Betsy Faria that the network’s long-running newsmagazine Dateline has covered for years. Is The Thing About Pam meant to be a dark comedy about Pam Hupp’s escalating lies or a serious drama about how she destroyed a family? Zellweger’s performance makes it hard to say.
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