[imagesource: NBC]

The amount of true-crime series being produced and released nowadays is relentless.

Hey, the entertainment industry is only trying to satiate everyone’s ravenous hunger for the rather dark genre.

But out of the hundreds of series to watch these days, NBC’s true-crime satire The Thing About Pam has a number of factors that make it stick out like a bloody hammer in the snow.

For one, Renée Zellweger and her odd donning of a fat suit.

Odd at least, from the perspective of The Daily Beast, questioning why, in this day and age, the performance of a midwestern busybody was not given to a real plus-sized actress.

The distraction of the padding and prosthetics aside, the Oscar-winning qualities of Zellweger have been recognised in this limited series.

Before we get to that review, here’s a quick synopsis:

The series is spun from a series of Dateline spotlights on the 2011 murder of Betsy Faria (played by Katy Mixon in the series), which NBC News had also previously turned into a podcast that shares a name with the new show. Initially, the killing was pinned on Betsy’s husband, Russ (Glenn Fleshler), who served time for the crime before a retrial exonerated him and led to their neighbor and Betsy’s friend, Pam Hupp, being charged.

Zellweger plays Pam—or, rather, Zellweger in a fat suit and a burned-down Madame Tussaud’s worth of prosthetics plays Pam, a busybody Missouri woman who seemed to be extremely annoying yet somehow convince her community that she was well-intentioned and had a good heart. And was definitely not a cold-blooded killer.

And the trailer:

Alright, back to Zellweger and her fat suit performance:

[She] is trying hard, and, in some respects, she’s delivering a fascinating, nuanced performance. But she’s also trying hard in other ways: to lumber around while carrying all this padding and prosthetics in any believable way, or to settle into this extreme physical characterization so that it’s all not distracting. Which it is. You stare so curiously at the prosthetics in every scene that it’s hard to focus on anything else.

Besides the use of prosthetics, the review also finds the show’s comedy confusing. Well, actually, the whole series seems to be confusing, although that might not necessarily be a bad thing.

As the review says towards the end, maybe it’s a good thing that the series leaves you so “unmoored” because it’s that “determined desire for clarity on what this show is” that will keep folks glued to their screens.

Perhaps, or people will keep watching to see how Zellweger handles this new body.

You can skip the show entirely and read the wild true story it’s based on here.

[source:dailybeast]