The Thing about Pam, episode 5: "She's Not Who You Think She Is" (Big Picture Company, Blumhouse Studios, NBC-TV, aired April 5, 2022)

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

Last night, after the two-hour PBS show about Benjamin Franklin, I watched the fifth and next-to-last episode of the NBC mini-series The Thing About Pam. “Pam” in this case is Pamela Hupp (Renée Zellweger), who in 2013 befriended a woman named Betsy Faria (Katy Mixon) who was dying of cancer, and got her to make over her life insurance policy so that she,not her husband Russ (Glenn Fleschler), would be the beneficiary. Then Betsy Faria died of stab wounds and Russ Faria was convicted of murdering her, largely on the basis of Hupp’s testimony at his trial. At the end of episode four Russ Faria’s attorney, Joel Schwartz (Josh Duhamel, the only actor in this series besides Zellweger whom I’d heard of before), appealed the case and won a new trial before a judge rather than a jury, which resulted in Russ’s acquittal after he had already served two years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Joel Schwartz was convinced that Pam Hupp had actually murdered Betsy Faria for her insurance money, and while he hadn’t been allowed to introduce evidence to that effect in the first trial because the judge and prosecutor Leah Askey (Judy Greer) were old friends, he got the evidence he needed when Tina (Rachael Thompson), a woman who worked in Askey’s office and whose sense of justice and fair play was outraged by the way Askey had rigged the first trial, leaked it to him. In this episode Askey writes a memo ordering the destruction of all the evidence in the Faria case – only Tina grabs the memo and shreds it before it can reach the local sheriff’s department.

The big thing that happens in this episode is that the TV show Dateline NBC airs what turns out to be the first of no fewer than five episodes they produce about the Betsy Faria case and the other misadventures of Ms. Hupp, whom they seem to be totally enthralled by: they produced five Dateline NBC episodes on her, a podcast and now this dramatic series with someone else playing her but Dateline NBC’s usual narrator, Keith Morrison, on the job here and NBC’s news division listed as one of the production companies. Though the show doesn’t come right out and say Pam Hupp murdered Betsy Faria, it hints at it so broadly that public opinion about her does a 180° turn and various clients she’s had in her business “flipping” real estate suddenly back out of deals she needs the income from when they realize the now-notorious Pam Hupp is involved. The show also deals with the attempts of Betsy Faria’s daughters, Mariah (Gideon Adlon) and Lisa (Olivia Luccardi) Day (they have a different last name because Betsy had them with her first husband, not Russ) to recover the $150,000 in life insurance money they feel (understandably) that Pam effectively stole from them, But they lose the case because the judge hearing it rules that barring some affirmative act from Betsy Faria indicating that she wanted her daughters, not Pam, to get her insurance money, Pam wins the case (not that she would actually have had the money to pay a judgment against her if she’d lost, since the money is already long gone by now).

In an act of brazen chutzpah, Pam shows up with her husband Mark (Sean Bridgers) at the local diner where Mariah works as a waitress, and intimidates her with her sheer presence until a disgusted Mariah brings out the Hupps’ meal to go and then leaves the small town of Troy, Missouri for California because she’s tired of losing every battle to Pam over and over again. Mariah tries to get Lisa to leave with her, but Lisa refuses and decides to stay in Troy again. The last scene of the episode is Mariah’s discovery that a letter supposedly written by her stepfather, Russ Faria, explaining that he never wanted to see her again was actually secretly written by Pam. And as if Pam didn’t have enough problems, a local attorney named Mike Wood (Dane Davenport) has decided that the only way he can bring justice to Russ Faria is to ron against Leah Askey for district attorney, and virtually the whole of his platform is a promise to prosecute Pam for Betsy’s murder. It’s hard to believe that someone like Renée Zellweger, who won an Academy Award for playing Judy Garland in the last year of her life (when she was an almost total mess but still had what was left of her vocal talent and sheer stage presence to redeem herself and move audiences), could play this odd cornpone psycho, but this show has been a tour de force for her and only Judy Greer as Leah Askey has been her true rival in the acting department. The Thing About Pam has been good clean sleazy fun, and I’m glad that after missing the first two episodes I finally caught up with it in time for Russ Faria’s first trial – the one at which he was convicted, largely due to Pam’s perjured testimony – and I’ve been able to watch the next three and am eagerly awaiting the final one next week.