The Thing About Pam, episode 3: "She's a Star Witness" (Big Picture Company, Blumhouse Television, NBC News Studios, NBC-TV, aired March 22, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I wanted to go through a relatively short film because at 10 p.m. I wanted to watch the latest episode of the NBC-TV series The Thing About Pam, based on a true-crime story from Troy, Missouri in 2011: the murder of Betsy Faria (Katy Mixon), a woman who was already suffering from terminal breast cancer that had spread to her ilver. On December 27, 2011 Betsy visited her friend Pam Hupp (Renée Zellwegger) six days after Betsy had changed the beneficiary on her insurance policy from her husband Russ (Glenn Fleshler) to Pam. Ostensibly this was to make sure the payout was put into a trust fund for Betsy’s daughters (not from Russ but by a previous relationship), but Pam collected the insurance money and put it in her own account instead. Russ Faria was convicted of his wife’s murder in 2013 after an outrageously unfair trial in which the woman judge (Heather Magee) was not only a Best Friend Forever of the woman prosecutor, Leah Askey (Judy Greer), the prosecutor was also having a sexual affair with the male sheriff’s deputy in charge of the case.

Among the judge’s most bizarre rulings was that Russ’s attorney, Joel Schwartz (Josh Duhamel), was not allowed to offer alternate theories of the crime and in particular was not allowed to suggest in any way that Pam Hupp was the actual killer, even though incontrovertible evidence had established that she was the last person to see Betsy Faria alive. The third episode – the one I watched on TV last night – covered the trial, the disappointment that Russ Faria went through when his two stepdaughters become star witnesses for the prosecution, Pam’s own twisted tales of the events when she takes the witness stand, and the interest shown in the case by the producers of the true-crime NBC-TV series Dateline NBC, who did no fewer than five episodes on the story from 2014 to 2019.

The Wikipedia page on Pam Hupp, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Hupp, offers quite a lot of additional information, including the identity of the next person Pam killed, Louis Gumpenberger (Jeff Ryan Baker in his first TV role), described on NBC’s Web page for the series, https://collider.com/thing-about-pam-cast-character-guide/, as follows: “Pam’s first victim, or so they thought. Louis was an unsuspecting participant in a twisted fantasy that ended in murder. Gumpenberger had sustained impaired mental and physical capabilities after a devastating car accident in 2005, which made him an easy target for Pam’s scheme.” Pam shot Gumpenberger three times on August 16, 2016 and ultimately entered a guilty plea to the crime, so she was already in prison when authorities started looking at her as a possible suspect in Betsy Faria’s murder, too. Pam was also accused of killing her own mother, Shirley Neumann, who fell off an apartment balcony in what was originally ruled an accident. The Thing About Pam is a star turn for Renée Zellwegger, who dominates the show and creates an unforgettable characterization. Otherwise, this series is pretty much a mess, and NBC made the unusual (to say the least) decision to have Keith Morrison, the familiar narrator’s voice on Dateline NBC, narrate this as well just to make it seem like a true-crime story instead of a scripted series just based on a true-crime story.