The Thing About Pam review: Fat suit-wearing Renée Zellweger is awful in this true crime drama-Josh Stephenson-Entertainment – Metro

The series is based on the real life case of Pam Hupp, who murdered her friend Betsy and framed her husband (Picture: Skip Bolen/NBC)

There’s no stopping the abundance of true crime drama series hitting our television screens at the moment.

So we probably didn’t need Paramount+ to buy the rights to this American adaptation of a popular true crime podcast.

After watching it, however, I can confirm that we really didn’t need them to.

The Thing About Pam tells the crazy true story (like there’s any other kind in this genre) of Pam Hupp, who murdered her friend, Betsy, and pinned the crime on her bumbling husband Russ (Glenn Fleshler) who was wrongfully convicted in 2013 before his eventual acquittal after serving nearly four years.

This isn’t a spoiler, not really, as the whole thing is spelt out for you in the first episode – instead the series is more interested in the bad decisions from the district attorney (Judy Greer) that led to his wrongful conviction despite the efforts of his defence lawyer Joel Schwartz (Josh Duhamel).

The big draw here, though, is Renée Zellweger in a rare television appearance as the scheming Pam Hupp. Now, and without wanting to sound too mean, she’s bloody awful in this.

First off: what did they do to her? She’s covered in these distracting facial prosthetics and an ill-thought-through fat suit that makes it look like they’ve cast a Madame Tussauds waxwork rather than an Oscar-winning actress.

But even ignoring all of that, she’s far too over-the-top here: her Hupp is less a calculating, cruel murderer and more of a faintly ridiculously, gurning Karen who delivers every line like they’re about to ask for the manager. It’s all very distracting.

Then there’s the cringe-inducing narration, which doesn’t help matters. Keith Morrison, who is the iconic voice behind the American documentary series Dateline (which did a series of episodes on Pam Hupp that ended up helping to exonerate the husband), lends his voice again here and the whole thing is too clever by half.

Renée Zellweger wears an ill-thought-through fat suit to play murderer Pam Hupp (Picture: Skip Bolen/NBC)

It’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek but instead it comes across as self-congratulatory, and for a UK audience who are unlikely to know who he is, it makes the whole thing feel weirdly parodic.

And this becomes a running problem with the show: is this meant to be funny? Because if it is then they’ve forgotten to put any jokes in and yet the whole tone feels off.

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Are we meant to be laughing at Pam and her oversized Big Gulp as she gets to gurning through her next interaction? Are the bumbling cops too stupid to realise the very obvious truth under their noses meant to be something we roll our eyes at and chuckle away?

All this matters because this is a real story of a murdered woman whose family had their lives torn apart – the very least you can do is treat the death of someone you document with a modicum of respect.

The Thing About Pam comes across as glib, almost gleeful, at every missed clue and act of bad policing, like this is a fictional drama and not something that actually happened which we should be angry about.

That, if you ask me, is the real true crime.

Streaming now on Paramount+

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