The Thing about Pam, episode 4: "She's a Loving Daughter"(Big Picture Company, Blumhouse Television, NBC-TV, aired March 29, 2022)

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

At 10:10 p.m. last night I turned on NBC and watched the latest episode of The Thing About Pam, dealing with a cornpone psychopath hamed Pam Hupp (Renée Zellwegger) who befriended a terminal cancer patient, Betsy Faria (Katy Mixon), got her to switch the beneficiary on her life insurance policy from her husband Russ Faria (Glenn Fleshler) to Pam, then allegedly killed Betsy and testified against Russ in his murder trial, which resulted in his conviction and incarceration for three years. All this happened in Troy, Missouri, where Pam was a well-known figure as a real-estate ”flipper,” buying homes and then reselling them again at a major profit. This started to arouse the antagonism of Pam’s husband, Mark Hupp (Sean Bridgers), who wondered how they were going to be able to afford all the mortgage payments his wife was racking up. She’s already gone through the $150,000 payout on the life insurance policy Betsy made over to her – it was supposed to be held in trust for Betsy’s daughters by a previous marriage but Betsy transferred it to her own account and ran through it in nothing flat (in one of the episode’s most bizarre and sickening scenes she holds up a $1 bill in front of Mark and announces to him that that’s all there is left of the policy income).

What we also didn’t know about Pam is that she was also looking after a sick and incontinent mother, and given that I worked as an in-home caregiver for 37 years the arguments between them and the bitchery on both sides,with Pam’s mom complaining about how she was never there for her and forced her to lie around all day in her own shit, while Pam kept telling her mom that she’d be helpless without her, were familiar to me even though I never treated a client as badly as Pam treated her mom. (At least I hope I didn’t.) One of the things Pam’s mother, Shirley Neumann (Celia Weston) was mad at her for was her first marriage to a man named Gunderson – apparently the Gundersons and the Neumanns had long hated each other, sort of like the Ashtons and the Ravenswoods in Lucia di Lammermoor – and though she eventually broke up with him and married Mark Hupp, she brought a new little Gunderson, Randy (Kyler Porche), into the world. (She also had a son with Mark Hupp, Travis, played by Drew Scheid.) At the end of the episode Pam and her mom have an argument which ends with her mom falling off her apartment balcony and dying from the fall. Officially the death was ruled an accident, but we’re obviously supposed to think that Pam found her mother too burdensome and pushed her off the balcony.

While all this is going on prosecutor Leah Askey (Judy Greer), who prosecuted Russ Faria in the first place and is still convinced he killed his wife, is running for re-election and is facing Russ’s defense attorney, Joel Schwartz (Josh Duhamel,the only cast member besides Zellwegger I’d actually heard of before), who is seeking a so-called “Mooney motion” to win Russ a new trial. (When Pam hears about this she’s resentful that her testimony is being questioned and she calls this a “money motion,” protesting because she hasn’t any.) Joel gets a break when Tina (Rachael Thompson), Askey’s guilt-ridden assistant, leaks Joel some of the evidence Askey had illegally refused to turn over to him in the first trial. Among them are the photos of the crime scene taken with Luminol, a chemical we regular Law and Order watchers are familiar with because it’s supposed to light up wherever blood has been spilled no matter how much of an attempt there’s been to clean it up. The photos are dead-black, which in the original trial Askey told Joel was because the camera had malfunctioned, but in the retrial Joel has the evidence he needs to convince the new judge – he’s requested a bench instead of a jury trial – that the reason there was no blood on Russ’s floor was he hadn’t killed his wife and therefore there had been no blood for him to have to clean up.

Also while all this is going on a crew from Dateline NBC (whose long-standing narrator, Keith Morrison, was used on this scripted series about the case as well) is investigating the case and checking out Russ’s claims that he is innocent and Pam is the most likely real killer – and Pam, whose testimony was so decisive to the outcome of the first trial, in the retrial isn’t called at all. Askey washes her hands of Pam after she invents a truly bizarre story that she and Betsy Faria were Lesbian lovers and Russ killed his wife out of jealousy, and Joel briefly considers calling her as a witness for the defense but decides not to because “we’ve heard enough of her lies.” The next (and last, at least we hope) two episodes deal with Pam’s next victim, Louis Gumpenberger (Jeff Ryan Baker), whom she shot and later pleaded guilty to, which led in turn to the reopening of the Faria case and Pam’s indictment in 2019, though in the latest development her trial has been delayed indefinitely because Pam’s public defender suddenly died of a heart attack. The Thing About Pam is an acting tour de force for Renée Zellwegger,at once a grimly determined psycho and an almost childlike figure – and if anybody else takes acting honors for this show it’s Judy Greer, who vividly demonstrates Askey’s absolute conviction that Russ murdered his wife and anyone who suggests anything different is just arbitrarily undermining the justice her office achieved in the case.