Renée is the latest A-lister to move to the small screen – in this odd suburban murder mystery
THE MOST IMMEDIATELY striking feature of The Thing About Pam is not that star Renée Zellweger is wearing a body suit, face altering prosthetics and a full suburban wardrobe, entirely befitting her strange anti-heroine, Pam Hupp. No, it’s that in her new guise Zellweger looks remarkably like the sublimely camp comedy actor and The White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge. I spent the first 10 minutes of the pilot wondering quite what Coolidge would make of it, just one of several distractions in this new murder mystery.
Based on a true story – isn’t everything these days? – The Thing About Pam is a slightly bizarre story. We are in the Republican heartland of Troy, Missouri, two nights after Christmas. Pam is due to collect her best friend Betsy from her mother’s house. Betsy has cancer and has been for a course of chemotherapy. She’s also in the processes of getting back together with her estranged and partially layabout, pot-smoking husband, Russ.
Zellweger keeps giving sly eyes to camera and narrowing her mouth, imparting some ill is at hand. When Russ arrives, he finds Betsy with 60 stab wounds and a knife in her neck. He immediately, of course, becomes number one suspect. But does Pam know more than she’s letting on?
Working from the evidence to hand from the first episode, it’s tricky to ascertain exactly what the (actual) thing about Pam is. Evil? Calculated? Homicidal? Or just keep-up-with-the-joneses suburban? A voiceover narrator delivers the story somewhere between a Hammer horror trailer and seasonal pantomime. There is a touch of John Waters ham to the styling of the show, replete with ill-fitting wigs and dreadful fleece dressing gowns, which means you’re never quite sure whether it’s a black comedy.
It’s Zellweger who does the heavy lifting through the miscarriage-of-justice story. As her new face grows on you, so too does her portrait of Pam Hupp. By the end of episode one I was fully engaged in a show that won’t quite do what Mare Of Easttown did for Kate Winslet, but once more confirms Zellweger in the upper bracket of the modern screen greats.
From 21 July, Paramount+