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If Renee Zellweger does not win Emmy for this series, we will be very angry Israel today

2022-07-07T11:47:46.773Z


Real crime is starting to lose its power, but with "All About Pam" NBC have managed to create a feature version that pushes the boundaries of the genre, with the addition of comedic and grotesque elements to a shocking and unbelievable story • Much thanks to its star, the series is proof And reinvent itself


In 2015, the heterocream genre became a niche documentary genre and inferior to those who understood things and became the queen of prom.

After the huge popularity of HBO's excellent "Jinx" and the apt Netflix answer "Making A Murderer", docu-crime has become an audience favorite, a content product that every media outlet has boasted of varying degrees of success.

The second half of the previous decade was the golden column of the genre, which created alongside a variety of films and series, an obsessive preoccupation with crime and human evil in other formats and platforms as well.

Simultaneously with the rise of podcasts as a convenient content medium for consumption, Spotify and other listening services also began to emerge as successful and popular crime scenes.

One of them is "The Thing About Pam", which dealt with the shocking murder of Betsy Paria in 2011, by her not-so-good friend Pamela Happ.

NBC recently aired a six-episode drama of the same name based on the podcast in question and unfolds this truly incredible story (which happened in reality) - this time as a feature series.

This is a smart move on the part of NBC, which has come to understand that at this point the genre has pretty much exhausted itself and for a long time it has been refusing to release a series or film worthy of the title of "must-watch."

Even if the documentary crime is not going to go away any time soon, it can be stated that it has pretty much exhausted its historical role and perhaps, hopefully, opened a window for many to a documentary world that does not necessarily deal with the soft underbelly of modern society.

Another smart move by NBC was to cast Renee Zellweger for the lead role, a pretty accurate definition of how she plays the femme fatale killer would be "Bridget Jones plus a good few pounds. And on crack."

Pam's story seems to have been written as material for a black and campy comedy.

And this is exactly the treatment given to her by the series, which in Israel was called "All About Pam" and abroad was received with sympathetic criticism, dipped in gossip about the sometimes comical way in which she chose to present a rather shocking case of murder and incrimination. And passive-aggressive in a place called O'Fallon, a suburb of St. Louis which is in Missouri.

 Not much into the first episode, Pam, who gets a particularly grotesque imitation in the hands of the excellent Zellweger in the role, murders her friend and takes care of a host of dubious alibis.

All this while speculating - and rightly so, that as is customary in such cases, the immediate suspect in the crime would be Russ, Betsy's partner, who at the time was staying with a number of friends on a rather geeky "dungeon and dragon" style role-playing game.

His own group of alibis do not help him.

Nor is evidence such as a receipt from a chain of fast-food restaurants and telephone location documents proving he could not have been present at the scene at the time of the act, and he was convicted in 2013 of murder.

From there things get complicated and unraveling, not least thanks to a city attorney (actor Josh Duhamel) who manages to defeat the messy police-legal connection he faced.

A new approach to telling a crime story.

"All About Pam",

The series is accompanied by the familiar voice of "Dateline" journalist Keith Morrison, a narrator who adds a cynical interpretation to the actions of Pam, a character who brings out a game show from Zellweger that we haven't seen in quite a few years.

All six episodes are conducted in a sort of urgent sense of drowsiness.

It is full of disturbing images but designed to be spectacular, some of them quite comical.

Some would argue that this is a trash product at high production costs, and this would not be a completely inaccurate definition.

And yet, the fact that this is a true story constantly resonates against the backdrop of the bizarre happenings and conduct of the main character here, as well as that of those around her, who actually take part in an absurd theater that happened in reality and should frighten and harass any American citizen who believes in his country's justice system.

But the thing about "The Thing about Pam," is the fact that it introduces a new approach to telling a crime story after the creators' favorite genre to do so in recent years has been exhausted.

Zellweger's Pam is really an extreme of the suburban White Trashy type.

A grotesque cartoon of an exploitative and evil-minded society, willing to do anything for plastic surgery and economic security.

Including taking a life or destroying it.

While this is not a stick that can be repeated over and over again (watching it is something that also requires mental strength and the ability to consume this type of content with a sober eye and to some extent jokingly), it does give the impression that heterocream does not have to die, as is often the case.

For someone who has already rushed to bury this storytelling technique as if she were a murder victim of Pam Happ, "All About Pam" is proof that television crime can still change, evolving to gain a plot interpretation that transcends the rules of the genre.

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Source: israelhayom

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