You better believe that the American Dream will have a snook thoroughly cocked at it. It peers askance at the pathologies raging behind white suburbia’s cute picket fences. “The drinks we buy! The shops we frequent!” “Oh, the mundane moments of every day!” chimes that voiceover, condescension thickly pouring down like the cherry syrup Pam pumps into her pop. She and the cashier know each other by name a passing police officer is greeted by Pam with some folksy, mumsy flirting. First, though, we establish how she poked her fingers into every pie in Troy, Missouri, by watching her stroll into a convenience store to pick up a big plastic cup of DayGlo soda. The Thing About Pam’s six episodes allege that Hupp manufactured that injustice but that she was eventually exposed. Indications that Hupp might in fact be the killer, turned up by Russ’s lawyer, were ruled inadmissible in court.
The cops, for their part, immediately assumed Russ’s guilt and never wavered from that, despite a marked lack of evidence against him. The last person to see Betsy alive, Hupp was incredibly forthcoming to police with incriminating gossip about Russ and a contrived alibi for herself. Hupp was finally charged with murder last year after Faria’s husband, Russ Faria, had his 2013 conviction for her murder overturned. If Zellweger can deliver a Hollywood-powerhouse encapsulation of this monster that makes Pam interesting, The Thing About Pam might have a chance. Behind some squishy prosthetics – Pam has the complexion of a woman on an all-pastry diet – we can make out the features of Renée Zellweger.
DATELINE NBC THE THING ABOUT PAM TV
Soon we have met our antihero Pam Hupp, a real-estate agent with a Martha Stewart bob and trouser suit, whose manic TV ads for her business confirm that she is a nightmarishly toxic Wasp, a cauldron of passive aggression and beady-eyed acquisitiveness. Every show in the recent rash of scripted dramas based on real crimes runs the risk of exploiting a horrifically traumatic event The Thing About Pam smugly places itself above such concerns.
DATELINE NBC THE THING ABOUT PAM SERIES
The sort of place that didn’t make a fuss.” The arched-eyebrow tone – somewhere between the omniscient commentator in Desperate Housewives, the audience-baiting storyteller in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and Morgan Freeman when he is overdoing the comforting wisdom shtick – announces that we will be taking a sideways look at the night Betsy Faria was stabbed 55 times and left on her living room floor with a kitchen knife in her neck. “A small, quiet town,” purrs an elder male voice as the scene is set. Apparently minor creative choices can, on occasion, communicate everything that is wrong with a show. Alarm bells ring within the opening seconds of the first episode, because The Thing About Pam is cursed with an ironic, singsong narrator. S omething is off from the start in The Thing About Pam (Paramount+), a true-crime comedy drama based on a murder that took place in Troy, Missouri in 2011.
0 kommentar(er)
