'The Thing About Pam' dresses up Renée Zellweger for an odd 'Dateline' drama

Drama meets "Dateline" in "The Thing About Pam," an NBC series that seeks to turn one of the newsmagazine's salacious stories into a limited series, complete with ghoulish narration by reporter Keith Morrison. Featuring Renée Zellweger tromping around under the weight of prosthetic makeup, it's a true-crime experiment that clearly wants to be the next "Fargo" and doesn't get there.

"Dead wife. Guilty husband feigning grief," Morrison intones in his trademark style, characterizing the assumptions that met the 2011 murder of Betsy Faria, and the suspicions cast on her husband Russ ("True Detective's" Glenn Fleshler).

But the key player in the drama turns out to be Pam Hupp (Zellweger), a friend of the dead woman who happened to be the last person to see her alive. Pam seems a little too eager to point fingers at Russ, telling detectives working the case that he was "not nice verbally to her. You know the type."