Something is off from the start in The Thing About Pam (Paramount+), a true-crime comedy drama based on a murder that took place in Troy, Missouri in 2011. Alarm bells ring within the opening seconds of the first episode, because The Thing About Pam is cursed with an ironic, singsong narrator. Apparently minor creative choices can, on occasion, communicate everything that is wrong with a show.
“A small, quiet town,” purrs an elder male voice as the scene is set. “An unobtrusive little place. The sort of place that didn’t make a fuss.” The arched-eyebrow tone – somewhere between the omniscient commentator in Desperate Housewives, the audience-baiting storyteller in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and Morgan Freeman when he is overdoing the comforting wisdom shtick – announces that we will be taking a sideways look at the night Betsy Faria was stabbed 55 times and left on her living room floor with a kitchen knife in her neck. Every show in the recent rash of scripted dramas based on real crimes runs the risk of exploiting a horrifically traumatic event; The Thing About Pam smugly places itself above such concerns.
