True crime isn’t a TV genre abounding with taste. It’s inherently icky to dredge up real-life tragedy for entertainment, even when the execution is unassailable. And no matter how respectful its approach, every potboiler ripped from the headlines bears a 100 per cent risk of offending someone. The People v OJ Simpson (2016), based on the American football player’s murder trial in the killing of his wife and her boyfriend, was celebrated by critics for contextualising a terrible crime that became a tabloid sensation, but the victims’ families hated it.
This year’s Andrew Garfield miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven aspires to use a horrific double-murder as a vehicle for sensitively exploring that most secretive American religion: Mormonism. As I’m sure you can guess, many LDS church members have taken issue with the whodunnit.
Which brings us to The Thing About Pam, starring two-time Academy Award winner Renée Zellweger. With a hammy Desperate Housewives voiceover and a fatsuit-wearing star at its centre, the black comedy, from Paramount+, appears singularly determined to prove that taste is overrated. It takes a tragic tale of human loss and turns it into heartless satire. I’ve seen good true crime and I’ve seen middling true crime, but never have I seen a true crime series that so fundamentally misunderstands the formula.
The six-part mini-series is based on the 2011 Missouri murder of Betsy Faria, a cancer-stricken mother of two who was stabbed to death by Pam Hupp, a part-time house-flipper she believed to be her best friend. Zellweger plays the middle-aged murderess, whose most notable characteristics are a penchant for XXXL fountain sodas and a charmless incompetence at keeping her lies straight. The notion that Betsy (Katy Mixon, Mike & Molly) ever could have trusted this cartoon version of Pam – sloppy, greedy, mean – enough to make her the beneficiary of her life insurance policy is as insulting as it is narratively implausible.
Given the glut of true crime offerings, it’s critical for a series to distinguish itself fast. In this case, The Thing About Pam has to compete with the original The Thing About Pam, a hit 2019 podcast from sensationalist US news programme Dateline. The unique selling point here is Zellweger in the unlikely role of villain protagonist. But these days, it’s probably harder to find a true crime show without a big Hollywood name above the title. In 2022 alone, we’ve seen Toni Collette and Colin Firth in The Staircase, Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones in Under the Banner of Heaven, Taron Egerton in Black Bird, Elle Fanning in The Girl From Plainville, and Jessica Biel as real-life killer Candy Montgomery in Candy, a role Elizabeth Olsen is also set to play on an HBO series before the year is out.
Once a viewer is done with the initial intrigue of stunt casting, what’s left is a series so tonally deranged, you’ll forget to wonder how Zellweger could be convinced, in the year 2022, to wear a prosthetic fatsuit. The melodramatic narrator – voiced by Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison – is so winkingly smug, you get the feeling he’s happy Betsy died – just so he’d have an excuse to talk. “They say when someone tells you who they are, believe it,” he says of Pam, bastardising Maya Angelou’s sage advice while chipping away at what makes a whodunnit fun to watch in the first place. It’s hard to play armchair detective with an infallible narrator pointing his almighty finger at the only suspect.
Alas, there’s not much mystery to be solved here. In real-life, Betsy’s husband served time for her murder before being exonerated and replaced behind bars by Hupp, but, curiously, the series never lets its audience make the same mistake detectives and prosecutors did. It passes up the chance to be an infuriating look at criminal justice in America to make fun of the people involved: the do-nothing cops; the know-nothing prosecutor; even the convenience store clerk who sells Pam her soda isn’t too low for the show to punch.
“Certain characters, events, locations, dialogue and names have been changed for dramatic effect,” read the familiar boilerplate legalese appended to episode two. I guffawed. It felt spoofy, like how director John Waters jokingly ran a “true story” disclaimer before the 1994 campy black comedy Serial Mom, starring Kathleen Turner as a Stepford wife who starts killing the neighbours. There’s little risk of someone mistaking The Thing About Pam for an accurately told story. And maybe if it had been a satire based on some made-up crime committed by a comedy villainess desperate for plastic surgery money, The Thing About Pam would have been a triumph.
But just as there’s little that feels “true” about the crime presented, it’s hard to imagine a viewer hard-hearted enough to laugh. When it comes to the tacky, exploitative depths of true crime, let’s hope we’ve finally hit the bottom of the barrel.
