Renée Zellweger to dive into true-crime TV madness for NBC's The Truth About Pam

Fresh off a critically hailed performance in last year’s Judy Garland biopic Judy, Renée Zellweger is giving this whole “television” thing another shot. THR reports that the Bridget Jones star has signed on for a starring role in The Truth About Pam, a new NBC limited series drawing from a popular run of Dateline stories (and a companion true-crime podcast, natch) about convicted murderer Pam Hupp, a Missouri woman who has been accused of framing a man named Russ Faria for the murder of his wife Betsy in 2011, and later convicted of killing another man as part of a convoluted scheme to potentially implicate Faria even further.

This won’t be Zellweger’s first foray into TV—she co-starred in Netflix’s What/If mini-series last year—but it will be her first time she’s been front and center as a series lead, especially one with quite so many lurid possibilities. (To some extent, Zellweger may have missed much of the big move toward “prestige” actors taking on TV roles, which built up steam during a fallow period in her career in the early 2010s.) As Hupp—who’s accused, among other things, of faking being a Dateline reporter herself to lure in a victim—Zellweger will have a chance to play across the more demented registers of her range, teaming up with horror studio Blumhouse (who recently signed a deal to start adapting some of the NBC News division’s more exciting stories for drama) for The Truth About Pam.

Jessica Borsiczky, whose previous credits include UnReal and House Of Lies, will serve as a writer and showrunner on the six-episode series. Zellweger will also executive produce.