Condescension is an ephemeral concept; it exists only as an idea. You cannot see, feel, touch or taste it.
Not unless you’re watching The Thing About Pam, a new NBC miniseries for Pamela Hup. Here is a show that drips in condescension, swims in condescension, pours in condescension.
His whole wet goal seems to be to make the viewer feel smugly better than the people of Lincoln County.
Viewers in the St. Louis area do not need to introduce Hup, Troy, Missouri, a woman convicted of one murder and charged with another, Betsy Faria’s death in 2011. Faria’s husband, Russell, was convicted of the murder. in 2013, but was acquitted in a later retrial that focused on omissions in the prosecution’s case that ignored evidence that Hupp may have been the killer.
Police theorize that the man for whom she was convicted of murder, Luis Gumpenberger, was chosen at random and killed in a mad scheme to dispel suspicions of Faria’s murder.
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On top of that, Hup’s mother died from a balcony in 2013, and Hup was the last person to see her alive.
You’d think this weird and weird story would make a compelling miniseries. You’d think there was no way it could be so boring.
Much of the problem lies in the decision to take what would make a tight two-episode series and stretch into a relaxed six-episode saga.
All this extra time is spent watching the people of Lincoln County.
Check out the sticky Christmas decorations! Listen to the fun highlights! Watch Pam mix cherry syrup in her Big Gulp-sized Diet Dr Pepper glass! Check out the sticker sticker “I ♥ dogs” on Pam’s car!
The creators of the show obviously think that the bumper sticker is the funniest thing they’ve seen.
Two-time Oscar winner Renee Zellweger, who is also an executive producer, plays Pam. Deep in a thick suit that makes her look a little heavier than the real Hup, she utters her words with her tongue deep in her prosthetic enlarged cheeks. To Zellweger’s credit, she makes every word that escapes Pam’s lips sound like a transparent lie. But she plays the role as broadly as possible.
Subtlety is dead everywhere in this series. Judy Greer played the district attorney, then known as Leah Askey, as unjustifiably confident in what the show portrayed as her spectacularly limited abilities. Glenn Flashler unkindly plays Russell Faria in the role of a relaxed jaw.
By comparison, Josh Duhamel turned out to be relatively unharmed as lawyer Joel Schwartz. Schwartz is portrayed as the only intelligent man in the entire cast – probably because, as the story goes, he “rolled into town” from the big city of St. Louis.
About this story: In an embarrassingly shameless self-promotion, the series attributes to NBC’s “Dateline” that he climbed like a knight on a white stallion, digs into the story and reveals it. They may not have known of earlier reports from such local publications as Post-Dispatch and KTVI.
Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison, who is cursed with perhaps the smartest, most complacent voice in the world, tells five episodes of Dateline about Hup over the years, and he also tells this miniseries. The story is not just destructive and unnecessary, it is also pompous, secondary and banal.
When Betsy Faria left his loving mother for the last time, Morrison said: “It’s hard to know when saying goodbye will be important. Who would have thought that goodbye would be … forever? “
While the narrative is obviously the lowest point, the series manages to reach several relative peaks if you can stick to it long enough to reach them. In essence, the interesting scenes in the courtroom are clear and well-crafted. They do not even manage to offend the intelligence of the audience, so they have to stand out.
Local viewers will be happy to see that several outdoor scenes were indeed filmed in Troy, although others are clearly not. Watch out for palm trees in the background.
You know, the famous palm trees of Troy, Missouri.
What The Pam Thing • When 21:00 Tuesday, March 8 • Where NBC • More info nbc.com/the-thing-about-pam
Use this form to ask your questions about Pamela Hup and we may get an answer in the Inside the Post-Dispatch podcast next week.
Renee Zellweger believed that the Byzantine story of the woman in Troy, Missouri, could be great television.
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