Pam & Tommy is very watchable, but can leave you feeling queasy

The Washington Post

"The eight-part drama frames the fictionalized Pam (played by Lily James) as collateral damage amid the feuds, ambitions or mere day-to-day doings of men, hardly any of whom give a second thought to the trauma they so thoughtlessly inflict," says Inkoo Kang of the Hulu series based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article by Amanda Chicago Lewis. "And yet the series’ moralizing — combined with Anderson’s pointed refusal to participate in the project — only underscores the fact that the show replicates the exploitative dynamics it condemns. Pam & Tommy looks and sounds like many of the nostalgia-driven reevaluations of ’90s tabloid subjects of the past several years. The uncanny transformation of James, the English actress best known for Downton Abbey, into the tan, pencil-browed and stiff-haired blonde Baywatch star is a casting and makeup coup. The miniseries’s female focus and high-low pleasures — salacious details mingling with sociological observations — makes it a better season of American Crime Story than that show’s last two outings. But the miniseries doesn’t feel like I, Tonya or the Monica Lewinsky and O.J. Simpson/Marcia Clark seasons of ACS, because the women at the center of those stories had processed their pain and were ready to retell them, while Anderson appears not to be. One has to wonder how the show’s largely male creative team, some of whom worked on the projects mentioned above, came to the conclusion that it was worth making a TV show about the importance of consent without the consent of the woman they were depicting and potentially retraumatizing." Kang adds: "Pam & Tommy is about so many things at once: marriage, celebrity, privacy, professional jealousy, slut-shaming, black markets, the dawn of Internet pornography and, of course, consent. But just like last year’s The White Lotus, whose postcard-ready shots of Hawaiian sunsets and poolside leisure probably undermined its critiques of the racial and class privilege of visitors by inspiring more high-end tourism, Pam & Tommy will probably just fuel more curiosity about the tape — depicted here as super-hot and super-personal — that it’s implying none of us should watch."

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• Pam & Tommy is a whip-smart, funny, and ultimately poignant re-examination of an event that once seemed like an easy punchline for tabloids: The eight-part miniseries (based in part on a 2014 Rolling Stone story) humanizes Anderson (played by Lily James) and Lee (Sebastian Stan), acknowledges all the ways the theft of their sex tape transformed celebrity and media culture, and still manages to be absurd and at times hilarious in a way that will leave you gasping for breath," says Alan Sepinwall. "(It’s everything Ryan Murphy tried and failed to do with docudramas like Halston and Impeachment.)" He adds: "James’ and Stan’s performances go much deeper than their newfound resemblances to Anderson and Lee. They’re not playing the caricatures we thought we knew. James’ Anderson is particularly winning. She’s keenly aware of what the world expects of her, and of the wild benefits and intense drawbacks of her iconic physique. Often, she comes across as the small-town British Columbia girl she was before she became heroic lifeguard C.J. Parker, and she’s smart enough to know that Lee will not be healthy for her, even as she can’t resist his outsize charisma. And the magic of the thing is that Stan makes Lee seem genuinely charming — a dim, volatile a**hole to the rest of the world, but someone whose appeal to Anderson makes immediate, perfect sense."
• Pam & Tommy is a "trash-masterpiece": "Let’s get this out of the way upfront: Pam & Tommy is a blast. It’s a throwback to the time when the Internet barely existed, but it could be used to propagate a stolen celebrity sex tape that set tons of wheels in motion and threw a wrench into a love story that strongly resembles the Angelina and Billy Bobs and the Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Foxes of later days," says Kimberly Ricci. "And it’s sort-of a heist story, which could have been all fun and games if it hadn’t hurt someone in such a devastating way. So, it’s a trashy, guilty pleasure of a show that sparks some hindsight-guilt about not being able to look away from someone else’s misery. The eight-part limited series could also, in places, make you really think about heavier issues like consent (through a 2022 lens) and how 'wild' women are positioned vs. their equally (or even more so) wild male counterpoints." Ricci adds: "Let’s just say that this show does a fine job of not glossing over Pamela’s palpable discomfort over being repeatedly humiliated by this sex tape, but it doesn’t beat us over the head with it. And as unfortunate as the reality was (again, they never reasonably could have expected this tape to get out), this show gives this the most sensitive treatment as one could expect while still taking the salacious route."
• Pam & Tommy is both sordid and scolding, exploitative and excoriating, hell-bent on having its cake and sticking Tommy Lee’s d*ck in it, too: "Pam & Tommy, created by Robert D. Siegel (screenwriter of The Founder and The Wrestler) and inspired by a disconcertingly thorough 2014 Rolling Stone feature by Amanda Chicago Lewis, contains multitudes of genres, tones, and potential takeaways," says Rob Harvilla. "It’s a medium-gritty heist that involves flashy walk-and-talks through multiple pornography studios. It’s a gratuitous sex-scene bacchanal celebrating the trashy (but occasionally quite sweet) love affair between a buffoonish rock star and a crudely disrespected TV starlet. It’s a grim survey of that love affair’s Scenes From a Marriage–style dissolution once Tommy and especially Pam are victimized by—and the show is admirably unambiguous about this—a merciless act of revenge porn. And it’s a ’90s period piece in which the action begins in 1995 with a needle drop of Fatboy Slim’s 'Praise You,' which did not come out until 1998, and yes, obviously, I’m angry about that, too. What the show mostly wants to be, of course, is another Oh Geez We Did Her Dirty prestige reexamination of an unfairly maligned cultural figure, most of whom hail from the ’90s: Think Lorena Bobbitt, Monica Lewinsky, Marcia Clark, the Extended Britney Spears Documentary Universe, Tonya Harding. (Craig Gillespie, director of I, Tonya—and Cruella!—helms Pam & Tommy’s first three episodes, up on Hulu now, with a weekly rollout from there.) Pamela Anderson—whom James plays as bubbly but steely, impulsive but shrewd, naively optimistic but regularly the smartest person in a roomful of lecherous old-white-guy lawyers—does emerge, eventually, as this show’s true heroine, or at least its most noble victim...But for a trashy and shockingly bingeable eight-episode romp, there are an awful lot of dour a**holes fighting for screen time, and quite a few di*ks, too. Some of the d*ckishness is quite specific to the ’90s, but a lot of it, naturally, is timeless."
• Pam & Tommy is at its worst when paying lip service to feminism: "What pushes Pam & Tommy from inane, inconsistent but occasionally fun trifle into a more cynical realm is, ironically, its intermittent attempts to view the saga through a feminist lens," says Judy Berman. "Midway through the series, after Rand and Miltie start selling copies of the tape online, the mostly male producing team brings in a few credible female storytellers, including writer Sarah Gubbins (Better Things) and director Lake Bell, to weigh the scandal’s disproportionate impact on Pam. Suddenly, a character heretofore depicted as a simpering bimbo is issuing such searing third-wave critiques as: 'sluts don’t get to decide what happens to pictures of their bodies.' The show’s creators may have been genuinely moved to give Anderson, who reportedly finds its existence 'very painful' and resisted invitations to participate, her due. But even if that’s the case, their jumble of characterizations and tones—not to mention the laziness of churning out such a shoddy retelling of her public humiliation—does her a disservice. The same goes for the choice to paint the couple’s marriage as a whirlwind romance and relegate the six months Lee served in prison after pleading no contest to felony spousal battery charges to onscreen text. Pam & Tommy is the kind of story that’s almost impossible to tell in the post-#MeToo era—one that combines the cheap pleasures of trash culture with a sober accounting of systemic misogyny. Rogen and his collaborators would not have been wrong to fear a backlash to a lighter, more glib depiction of Anderson’s ordeal. But what they’ve made instead is a cowardly compromise that, talking phallus and all, seems bound to disappoint viewers of every stripe."
• Pam & Tommy will immediately grip you in its proverbial embrace: "More than merely being a lurid recreation of one of the ’90s biggest entertainment industry scandals, it’s a curious examination of America’s lust for intimacy (and our habit of dragging our most beloved women down)," says Meghan O'Keefe. "It’s a show that alternately titillates its audience and then indicts them for being titillated, along the way becoming a tragic paradox of itself... The series is worth watching for Lily James’s phenomenal, career-redefining turn as Pamela Anderson. However, the strengths of the series are ultimately undercut by its own wild ambitions. It wants to be a darkly comic true crime tale, a tragic love story, a cruel satire, and a reclamation of Pamela Anderson all at the same time. Ultimately, these divergent tones don’t come together in perfect harmony. For all the show’s strengths, it’s also dogged by the question: if all Pamela Anderson wanted — and deserved — was for the sex tape scandal to go away, then isn’t rehashing the story in a splashy 2022 streaming series doing more harm than good?"
• The story really belongs to Pam, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Tommy: "As the ill-fated pair, James and Stan manage to find groundedness alongside their characters' exaggerated public personas as flighty blonde sex symbol and dimwitted, erratic rock star," says Aisha Harris. "Sure, their whirlwind courtship is depicted as anyone rational from the outside looking in probably sees it: silly and doomed from the jump. (They were married just four days after that initial meet-chaotic.) Yet Pam & Tommy presents their relationship as emerging from a genuine place of mutual sexual and intellectual attraction, and Tommy frequently plays the role of over-the-top cheerleader as his wife attempts to expand her career beyond Baywatch. (Though there's a bit of an A Star Is Born trajectory going on here. As unlucky strangers he encounters learn, be careful what you say to him about his own pursuits; Mötley Crüe hasn't had a hit in years and it's a sore spot for Tommy.)"
• Pam & Tommy consists of three fun episodes followed by five episodes that will make you regret liking the first three: "As best I can describe it, Pam & Tommy is three fun-filled episodes — presumptively 'fun-filled' — packed with silly creative gambits and early Internet nostalgia, followed by five episodes designed to make you feel bad for liking the first three," says Daniel Fienberg. "It produces a weird friction in which some viewers are going to love those first three episodes and then complain about the reduced pizzazz in the next five. And other viewers are going to get so turned off by how bro-y the first three episodes, all directed by Craig Gillespie, are that they won’t have the patience to get to the last five, all directed by women. It’s a somewhat similar tactic to the one Hannah Fidell used in her FX adaptation of A Teacher — a few episodes of 'Isn’t teacher-student sex kinda hot?' followed by 'It’s gross and you should feel bad about yourself' for the rest of the season — and Fidell’s presence among the later Pam & Tommy directors (along with Lake Bell and Gwyneth Horder-Payton) is a big part of why I’ve convinced myself that the series’ two discordant tones were intentional rather than a mid-run course correction."
• Once you get past the astonishing makeup and prosthetics, Pam & Tommy essentially functions as two miniseries in one: "The first devoted to the central couple," says Brian Lowry, "and the latter to the hapless guy who turned them into a pioneering Internet sensation. The former works better, in a limited series that sprinkles social insight (if not quite enough) in with its salacious qualities and breezy nostalgia. To get the obvious out of the way, Lily James (especially) and Sebastian Stan disappear into the roles of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, whose whirlwind romance, week-later marriage and tumultuous relationship were in essence defined by the leak of a sexually explicit tape the pair had shot of themselves." He adds: "On balance, though, the series is still well worth watching, and not just for the parts designed to get all the attention -- namely, the ones that would warrant delivering it in a plain brown wrapper."
• Lily James’ Pam is an outright triumph, both of acting and of special-effects makeup: "To the latter point first, even viewers (like this one) not particularly concerned with visual realness will be genuinely stunned by the degree to which James has been made to resemble the Pam of the 1990s. Meticulousness of this sort can sometimes stand in for insight about a character, but here, it allows James leeway to push into aspects of Anderson we might not expect," says Daniel D'Addario. "The makeup department, in so precisely crafting an image, gives James the room to subvert it. And make no mistake — despite the double-barreled title, this is Pam’s show. Stan’s strong performance as Tommy is framed through the rocker’s impact on his wife: He’s her teammate in combating scandal and the provocateur whose outbursts she cannot withstand. But it’s Pam who holds one’s gaze. James, an alumnus of Downton Abbey, plays her as a congenital optimist who grows chastened and weary as each seeming chance to push beyond the red swimsuit evades her. Tommy perpetually wants to amplify, to react; Pam is a force for deliberation and calm." D'Addario ads: "Pam & Tommy is an attempt to complicate a tabloid story. As a dramatization of events that have slipped into history, Pam & Tommy is part of a crowded genre. But its curiosity and sensitivity toward its subjects set it apart."
• Pam & Tommy wouldn't work without Lily James and Sebastian Stan -- and the show's hair and makeup team: "The whole thing would fall apart if James and Stan didn’t inhabit Pam and Tommy with as much charisma as the stars they’re playing and the empathy necessary to make us feel for people whose images have tended toward the cartoonish," says Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. She adds: "Stan disappears into the role in a way (James) Franco likely wouldn’t have, and in a way that balances nicely with James. You believe in Pam and Tommy’s love and humanity, which is the key to the whole thing, and exactly what was lost in the judgmental and pearl-clutching coverage of the sex tape at the time. All of this would be for naught if it weren’t for the spectacular work of the hair and makeup departments. Stan’s guy-linered, tattooed, usually-mostly-naked Lee is spot-on. But James’ transformation into Anderson is uncanny and downright shocking, given that James hews more toward Keira Knightley in her natural look. And, my God, extra accolades must go to the props and special effects folks: They made an onscreen conversation between Lee and his famously ample penis happen. It’s not the kind of thing you can judge on its 'realism,' and it’s hardly 'necessary.' Yet in a film where Lee’s endowment really is its own character, well, the point is made. And it is not something you’ll forget."
• Pam & Tommy is too exhausting: "Spending eight episodes with Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee is what I would imagine it would have been like to spend a lot of time with those two in real life at the time: fascinating at first in a human car wreck kind of way, equal parts hilarious and sad — but ultimately exhausting," says Richard Roeper. "Lily James does a fine job of capturing Anderson’s breathy, Marilyn Monroe-esque delivery and succeeds in expanding her character beyond the Playboy centerfold stereotypes, but Sebastian Stan’s performance is about as subtle as the Spinal Tap amplifier that goes to '11.' You won’t see that much ham on the table at a Vegas buffet. Stan’s Tommy Lee is a dim-bulb, narcissistic man-child who is rude and verbally abusive to nearly everyone with whom he has contact. Even when he’s effusively expressing his never-ending love for Pamela in the midst of a marriage that lasted all of three years, he sounds like a middle-schooler with a first crush. Pam & Tommy also wobbles from tonal inconsistency. Some episodes play like a B-movie take on Boogie Nights, while others seem to be aiming for the docudrama feel of I, Tonya. (In fact, the first three episodes of this series were helmed by I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie.) Alas, the scripts and performances don’t match the A-list work on those two films."
• The early going feels like Pam & Tommy trying to have its exploitation and feel superior to it, too: "It invites you to see the whole affair the way many people at the time did (especially late-night hosts like Jay Leno, played by Adam Ray), as a goofball tabloid escapade in which a pair of trashy celebrities get exposed," says James Poniewozik. "When 'the jokes write themselves,' as a Tonight writer says here, they tend not to be great jokes. But then it takes a shift, which makes me believe the yuk-it-up early tone is at least partly intentional: It starts treating its cartoons as people who feel real pain. This is especially true of Pam, played by Lily James, thanks in part to James’s sneakily complex performance. In a story that loves to go big and broad (Stan plays Tommy as a libidinous windup toy), she finds subtleties in a woman that Hollywood and the media want to make into a sex cartoon." Poniewozik adds that Pam & Tommy "is something both old and new. It is partly a picaresque porn-world caper, in the spirit of the pop culture of the decade in which it is set, like The People vs. Larry Flynt and Boogie Nights. And it is partly a 21st-century reconsideration of how that era treated young women, like Impeachment: American Crime Story, Framing Britney Spears and even Yellowjackets. Put the two sides together and you have a rollicking hybrid of heist comedy, love story and cautionary tale, whose clashing parts offer a dark-comic portrait of one era and a creepy preview of another: the gross, panoptical future of the internet, arriving at 28.8 kilobits per second."
• Pam & Tommy features two components that struggle to fit together: "The series seems to be setting up yet another story of a squalid crime, done by pitiful losers, that goes terribly wrong," says Richard Lawson. "Which would make for a compelling enough series. The mob is involved; a whole host of scuzzy San Fernando Valley characters is introduced; and there are plenty of jokes to be made about Gauthier having a small penis. But that series would, of course, provoke some moral questions, specifically about who should get the primary focus in a narrative that is ultimately about objectification and violation. Thus, Anderson and Lee’s side had to be appropriately considered, information gleaned from interviews, memoirs, and, it seems on the show, vague cultural memory. Those two components—the humanist look at victims of a crime and the free-wheeling black comedy of witless perpetrators—are never successfully married. Each half has its merits, particularly in a handful of sharp performances, but the mighty, summative synthesis they are supposed to reach by the end arrives forced, sledgehammered over our heads. Guilt, and the beginnings of atonement, come calling for Gauthier (Seth Rogen), while Baywatch star and Playboy Playmate Anderson (Lily James) and Motley Crüe rocker Lee (Sebastian Stan) make a weary peace with what’s happened to them and forge on with their lives. There is some kind of thematic resolution in Pam & Tommy, but the series struggles to drive home what it all, in the bigger sense, has been about."
• Pam & Tommy serves as an exploration of Pamela Anderson: "This isn’t just Lily James’ show but it’s also an exploration of Pamela Anderson as a woman, as an actress, and, sadly, as one of numerous individuals in the industry exploited and undermined for her looks," says Kristen Lopez. "Outside of the physical transformation James undergoes — she captures Anderson’s chunky blonde highlights and penchant for lipliner beautifully — she illustrates a lot of what made Anderson captivating. James never does an impression of Anderson, though she accurately captures Anderson’s squeaky laugh and husky vocal cadences, but more importantly James shows how personable Anderson could be. It’s not enough to charm men at a press event with a smile. We see her giving of her time, asking assistants on the Baywatch set about their kids. For all Anderson’s desire to be taken seriously as an actress, she remains dazzled by Hollywood and sees herself as just a person. Which is why it becomes so upsetting to see Anderson taken down by the events of the tape. James is a simmering kettle throughout the series’ first half. When Anderson deals with a traumatic event once the tape hits the net, James is able to let down that veneer of control and unleash her rage and sadness, culminating with cracking someone’s windshield. The series understands it can’t focus solely on how Anderson and Lee’s sex tape drastically changed how we look at celebrities, sex, and this weird thing called the internet. It also needs to examine how we talked about women. As numerous flashbacks to Anderson’s past show, her opportunity to become a star on the pages of Playboy magazine would be used against her in a humiliating deposition when her and Lee sued rival nude magazine, Penthouse (it also reveals that in all her work for Playboy she was never adequately compensated)."
• The soul of Pam & Tommy overflows with vulnerability and pathos, something that Impeachment: American Crime Story couldn't do: "Pam & Tommy is a funny piece of work in every sense of that description," says Melanie McFarland. "It commits to its comedic peaks with the same gritty energy it devotes to emotional lows, inviting us to ride the couple's champagne and ecstasy-driven hedonism as it portrays their love, however hastily realized, as genuine. Like several rear-viewing examinations of events and people whose downfalls played as salacious diversions in their time, the sex tape brouhaha receives a second look as one of the earliest tests of the Internet as a proliferating force and a pioneering privacy rights case. But where other ripped-from-near-history works like Impeachment fall short in fully connecting with the humanity of those involved, the soul of Pam & Tommy overflows with vulnerability and pathos. Their sex tape became a phenomenon for crucial reasons besides its easy availability, the writers posit."
• When it’s all over, it’s easier to appreciate Pam & Tommy as a metaphor for how the public responded to the tape in the first place: "Sometimes, Pam & Tommy struggles to blend its sense of humor with its darker themes—one of the most emotionally resonant episodes is jokingly called 'The Master Beta,' for example—but it’s a tonal tightrope that would be a tough one to walk for any writer’s room," says Brian Tallerico. "How do you capture the worldview of a filter-less hedonist like Tommy Lee and make the point to viewers that what these two wanted to do in the privacy of their home was their own damn business at the same time? The show’s writing is consistently sharp enough to thread that needle, especially in how it refuses to turn Pamela into a punchline again, which would have been so much easier for a lesser, shallower show to do. It helps a great deal that Lily James gets that too, capturing both the always-smiling optimism of Pamela and the growing frustration that the world would now forever only see her as the subject of a sex tape. Stan is good too, but the show seems less interested in Tommy Lee, sometimes allowing him to turn into a caricature of a wild rocker. What Stan nails the most is Tommy’s selfishness regarding the invasion of privacy, refusing to see how people would respond differently to a rock star caught in the act than an actress. Both performances are fearless in ways that TV is rarely allowed to be."
• Pam & Tommy both sympathizes with and exploits Pamela Anderson: "Director Craig Gillespie is very sympathetic to Anderson and presents the release of the tape as a cruel violation of her privacy and consent," says Noah Berlatsky. "But he also, without much apology, participates in and extends that violation. Pam & Tommy condemns the men who used Anderson’s sexuality to profit without her permission and at her expense. And then it uses Anderson’s sexuality without her permission, and arguably at her expense." He adds: "The series draws a bright line between Anderson’s consensual, paid nude modeling and the nonconsensual distribution of the tape, from which Anderson never made any money. But again, here’s where it gets complicated, because Pam & Tommy is also profiting from Anderson’s name and sexuality. The series producers didn’t get a signed release from her any more than Gauthier did. She wasn’t involved in the production and is not being paid. Lee reportedly is excited about the project, but Anderson has said nothing publicly about the series."
• Pam & Tommy elevates the 1990s nostalgia genre: "Unlike Ryan Murphy’s recent revisitation of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Craig Gillespie–directed series doesn’t just feel like a rehash of what we thought we knew," says Alessa Dominguez. "The show zeroes in on the story of the tape’s leak, partly from the perspective of the worker, Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), who stole it when Lee (Sebastian Stan) fired him from a house renovation. The narrative of the tape is juxtaposed with the tale of Anderson (Lily James) and Lee’s relationship, and the alternating angles work effectively to maintain interest. But the use of the scandal as a way of exploring their relationship dynamic loses steam before the show’s end. And its commentary on gender mores doesn’t quite live up to the miniseries’ performances and stylish production." Dominguez adds: "The main goal of the ‘90s and ‘00s revisitation genre has been to transcend nostalgia, often by reconsidering the gender politics and the women at the center of so-called scandals from a new vantage point. In that vein, the show focuses on the fallout of the tape, and how it made its way onto the internet and into public discourse and late-night jokes. It makes the obvious point that the tape wasn’t funny for Anderson in the way it could be for Lee, whose mythos as a cock rock star the tape further solidified. In contrast, one feels Anderson’s frustration and feelings of violation from the robbery and leak from the moment she comes upon a TV crew watching the tape as she’s trying to work."
• Pam & Tommy shows just how much Prestige TV has evolved: "It is an astounding, and yet perfect, sign of how the medium has so rapidly evolved that a series centered around Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee’s infamous 1995 sex tape is considered prestige television," says Kevin Fallon. "Yet that is precisely what this is—and it was only a matter of time before we got here. There are creative elements that signal this is prestige TV, even before you reckon with the subject matter and the subjects themselves: two celebrities whose notoriety and image—as judged by society—mean they’ve hardly been taken seriously over the years, let alone in a manner that would predict they’d be mentioned in the same breath as what we consider 'prestige.' ...It’s a series that makes you think in ways that might surprise you about bias, shame, and misogyny in terms of how a major news story unfurled 25 years ago—and what ways we might have all been complicit in the unsavory underbelly of a pop culture phenomenon. It’s also a true crime story. Many people, when they think about the Pam and Tommy sex tape and how it grew into a cultural punchline, forget that this was a private item that was locked up in a safe. It was stolen from them in a burglary and released without their consent—and, actually, much to their horror. This is also an eye-opening chronicle of the early days of the internet as it hit the mainstream; every advancement, growth in usage, and discovered possibility of what the internet could be coincides with the amplified availability and ensuing impact of the unauthorized sex tape. This is all to say that, across its eight episodes, Pam & Tommy is far more than a sniveling, pervy time machine revisiting a salacious sex scandal that’s been mocked for decades. But the genius is that it is also that: sniveling, pervy, and canny about the scandal and the mockery that piqued all of our attention in the first place."
• Pam & Tommy can't escape the exploitation at its core: "Despite the ’90s throwbacks and the great performances, Pam & Tommy isn’t exactly enjoyable to watch," says Olivia Truffaut-Wong. "Part of that is by design, especially further into the series when the sexism Anderson faced after the release of the tape comes to the forefront. Episode six, 'Pamela In Wonderland,' is particularly devastating: In the Hannah Fidell-directed episode, Pamela is forced to endure a humiliating deposition about her sex life and career as a model, and James’ ability to show Pam’s physical pain at having to endure unrelenting questions about her sex life is as heartbreaking as it is excruciating. It’s easily the best episode of the series because of James’ performance and Fidell’s direction, which allows the misogyny of the (all male) lawyers to speak for itself. Unfortunately, these moments of raw honesty are too few and far between. For whatever reason, Pam & Tommy chooses instead to focus more on Rand, fabricating an entire redemption arc for him, despite the fact that he doesn’t appear to have ever expressed any real remorse for stealing and releasing the tape. In contrast, the show completely changes Anderson’s and Lee’s personal lives, compressing the timeline of the births of their children. In the series, it looks like Pamela gives birth to their first son right after the two finally signed over the rights to the tape. In real life, however, Anderson and Lee welcomed their first son in June of 1996—as the underground sales of the tape began to spread—and she was actually pregnant with her second when she signed the 1997 release."
• Pam & Tommy quickly snowballs out of everyone's control, flitting from subplot to subplot with nary a chance to develop most of them: "A lot of the show’s barely-controlled chaos can be laid at the feet of I, Tonya and Cruella director Gillespie, who directs the first three episodes of the eight-episode series (and who never met a tracking shot or needle drop he didn’t like)," says Clint Worthington. "He turns on that same approach here, cameras constantly weaving and coasting through the immaculately-rendered ‘90s world the costume and production designers have set for themselves. It’s all very slick and diverting, but starts off the series with a breeziness that makes it harder for follow-up directors Lake Bell, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, and Hannah Fidell to bring down the hammer on the script’s justifiable cultural targets: sleazy TV producers, ogling fans and paparazzi, every craven opportunist who wants a piece of the pie. As an idiots-on-parade heist comedy, it sort of works—Rogen is always a reliable everyman, finding layers of likability in a dopey dude very clearly out of his depth and running entirely on impulse. But it’s hard not to feel that every time we cut away to see what pathetic shenanigans Rand’s up to (including, eventually, having to fashion himself into a reluctant mob enforcer for Andrew Dice Clay’s nasty loan shark), it takes significant time away from the real focus of the story: Pamela Anderson and the tape’s effect on her career, marriage, and life. It’s these components that work best, due in large part to James’ stunning lead turn as Pamela. While she doesn’t fully disappear into the role—Anderson, whatever you may say about her as a performer, is impossible to truly replicate—James’ physical transformation (including pouty lips, a breathy Marilyn Monroe whisper, and conspicuously ample chest plate) gets pretty close. What’s more, James does a service to her subject by avoiding the tabloid caricature of Anderson as a dumb bimbo, instead playing her with a refreshing self-awareness and welcome ambition, as blinkered as it may be."
• Pam & Tommy isn't interested in rewriting history — it wants to shine an unfaltering spotlight on true events, to the benefit of the series as a whole: "These larger-than-life celebrities who wound up catapulted into notoriety for all the worst reasons were by no means perfect people, but how much did they actually deserve what happened to them?" says Carly Lane. "Surrounded by unsympathetic figures, the two who are afforded the most understanding in the whole chain of events are Pam and Tommy themselves — and the final product leans more on acute commentary than satisfying resolution, illustrating what the spectacle around this couple's private life damaged for and between them in the long run while the rest of the world eventually moved on to the next big story making headlines. It's a series that is both consigned to a very specific then (the scene in which Rand has to explain the concept of the internet to Uncle Miltie being one shining example) and distressingly apropos for the now we're in. What captivates the public's attention and dominates conversation today can easily become yesterday's news — maybe just as quickly as it takes all of us to press play on the next video."
• Pam & Tommy doesn't give Pamela Anderson the vindication she deserves: "Pam & Tommy begins with neither Pam nor Tommy, but with (Rand) Gauthier," says Allison Picurro. "Its first episode barely features Pamela at all, and Tommy appears only as a bare-assed hothead of a side character in Gauthier's story. The series makes the bold, misguided choice to start off by withholding its two most interesting elements in favor of explaining at length how Gauthier, a contractor pushed to his breaking point after being fired and threatened by Tommy, was able to break into the Lees' house and drive off with a safe hidden in their garage. As the legend goes, he finds the tape, which Pamela and Tommy made on their honeymoon, hidden among money and guns. Seeing it as both a revenge tactic and a cash cow, he teams up with a porn producer (Nick Offerman) to release it, with VHS copies sold via this newfangled thing called the World Wide Web. As the episodes progress — there are eight in total — Pam & Tommy does, thankfully, shift its focus to its titular characters, attempting to explore the impact of unwanted exposure on their passionate, tumultuous marriage. Whiplash settles in as the series vacillates in tone, trying all at once to be a crime thriller, a raunchy sex comedy, a critique of the media, and a reflection on a very famous woman's inner turmoil. It never figures out how to effectively tie those elements together, nor is it able to successfully make the case that Gauthier's story is just as important as Pamela's, despite spending a not insignificant amount of time on him. She's so finely drawn, and so mesmerizingly played by James, that every other character feels underwritten in comparison. Any time she's on screen, the material is elevated; any time she's not, the whole show dims."
• Pam & Tommy turns a punchline into an all-too-human tragedy: "Over the past five years, we’ve seen a steady stream of prestige entertainment properties that attempt to both reclaim and reframe the lives of these women, positioning their stories as award-winning dramas rather than tawdry tabloid soap operas," says Lacy Baugher Milas. "From Tonya Harding (I, Tonya) to Monica Lewinsky (Impeachment: American Crime Story), Britney Spears (Framing Britney Spears), and Anita Hill (Confirmation), pop culture seems to finally be ready to admit that we did these women dirty and they deserved better from all of us. Hulu’s Pam & Tommy is the latest drama offering in this vein, an incisive, occasionally heartbreaking, and often laugh-out-loud funny exploration of the volatile relationship between former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson and Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee and the global scandal that followed in the wake their very private, very adult home video being leaked. And to be clear, the series is fantastic, anchored by transformative performances from stars Lily James and Sebastian Stan, as well as a crystal-clear sense of purpose. Because in this version of events, both Pam and Tommy are victims several times over, and no matter how many dumb decisions they may make, the Hulu show that bears their names never lets us forget that fact. But despite its often uncomfortable subject matter, Pam & Tommy smartly never takes itself too seriously."
• Pam & Tommy has a great story to tell, and it almost does: "The Big Short didn't have any talking penises, but that Oscar-winning screenplay full of celebrity-explainer tangents and direct-to-camera cheekiness opened the floodgates for a new era of hyperbolized true-life stories," says Darren Franich. "Pam & Tommy's early episodes are directed by Craig Gillespie, whose I, Tonya was another scandal cartoon full of broken fourth walls. The Rand subplot unfolds with purposefully comedic excess. When he discovers a certain personal tape inside the stolen safe, he seeks help from Uncle Miltie (Nick Offerman), a porno producer with connections. Various dudes-doing-crime montages ensue. I suspect the creators of Pam & Tommy would note that the series is meant to be a satire or something, purposefully over-the-top (and maybe purposefully unrealistic) in the search for deeper truth. I don't know; I sense a lack of confidence in the complicated material. Who wants to watch a web of lawsuits? Bring on the needle drops and Offerman going all Scarface! But Pam comes to vital life when it focuses on Pamela and her place in the tape's ascension to cultural prominence. The middle episodes zero in on her struggles — and are notably shorter, with less contrivances. In the midst of various personal and professional crises, James has to believably play both an unwitting bystander and an objectified object of fascination...Even at its best, though, Pam & Tommy is a bit soft on the details."
• For all of its success, Pam & Tommy falls short in the way that many of these Hindsight Is 20/20 projects tend to do: "It revisits a cultural watershed moment and reframes the participants from a contemporary perspective, and it has the grace to not be smug about its modern, supposedly enlightened point of view," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "(There are a few moments where it does revel in how far we’ve come, but surely no one would begrudge the series its ridiculous scene of Pam and Tommy rolling up to the Malibu Public Library, desperate for access to a modem so they can find their own video.) Still, like several of the other series in this genre, Pam & Tommy struggles to land on an ending. So, Pam & Tommy says, we were wrong about Pam, and maybe we also misunderstood Tommy. The 'we' there is always a little fishy, always involves its own level of underexamined cultural presumption. That aside, the narrative impulse is to reach for a conclusive button, a way to soothe away the unfairness or find a last twist of the knife. Neither is easy for Pam & Tommy. The ending of the tape story, its eventual digital ubiquity, isn’t even thanks to Rand, and Rand was neither punished nor made to really reckon with his actions. Tommy and Pam both faded into background cultural punch lines, a form of erasure the show also doesn’t know how to cope with. It reexamined them, sure, but it stuck with the most interesting parts, the parts people already sort of knew. What happened to all the later years? Or, in other words, what should an ending look like? It’s not a question Pam & Tommy really knows how to answer. Still, until that point, its cultural excavation is entertaining and comically sexy and scary and sad, a bit provocative. It’s enough to satisfy that cultural-revisitation urge: the desire to be surprised by a story you thought you already knew."
• Here's what is fact and what is fiction in Pam & Tommy
• Annapurna Pictures, the production company behind Pam & Tommy, has preserved PamSexTape.com
• Pam & Tommy doesn't have any Mötley Crüe music, but it's packed with memorable songs
• How the talking penis came to life in Episode 3: The idea to bring that to life on Pam & Tommy was just too good to pass up. "We could get away with it because he was high on Ecstasy at that time," says creator Rob Siegel in an interview with EW. "I felt like that gave us the green light. I like to think that could have actually happened — at least, in his mind. It was fun to write and not terribly hard; imagining what Tommy Lee's d*ck would say is pretty fertile material." Siegel adds there was some pushback: "There was a point where eventually it did reach some people who got a little worried, but it wasn't the great battle that I thought it was going to be. I don't know who sweet talked who, but there was a yes." Ultimately, Hulu supported Pam & Tommy as a boundary-pushing show. Obviously, the talking penis isn't based on Sebastian Stan's own penis. Designed by Autonomous FX and operated by Mike McCarty and Dave Snyder, the talking penis came to life via a combination of mostly practical effects with some added CG. "As a Star Wars fan, I'm partial to the animatronic puppet Yoda, the Frank Oz version, over the prequel's CGI Yoda — I just prefer, as I think most people do, things that are better done practically," says Siegel, adding: "From the start, we always wanted it to be an animatronic d*ck."
• Pam & Tommy makeup department head David Williams says even those on set while filming the show were blown away by Lily James' transformation: Williams was walking across the lot with James on the way to set, with James in “full-on Pam regalia,” he says, and as they walked by, one of the show’s grips almost fell off the back of a truck when he caught sight of her. “That’s the reaction we want,” Williams says. “We want people to fall off the back of the truck.”
• Pam & Tommy took measures to underscore the vastly diverging ways in which Anderson and Lee lived through the events of the sex tape scandal: Amanda Chicago Lewis, who wrote the 2014 Rolling Stone article on which the show is based on, served as a consultant. There were two women on the writing staff. And later episodes were directed by women, including Lake Bell, Gwyneth Horder-Payton and Hannah Fidell. “These two people had the exact same experience on film, that film was shown to the world, but she was slut-shamed out of the business and he was saved from being a has-been and reinvented as a sort of sex god,” says showrunner D.V. DeVincentis, who also worked on The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. “The only difference between them was gender.” When reports emerged that, based on sources, Anderson was unhappy with Pam & Tommy, the show's showrunners released the following statement: “We were constantly monitoring the fine balance of revealing how Pam was victimized while portraying people who lived rock ‘n’ roll lives. Everyone involved in making the show was in a near-constant dialogue about how our portrayal would thread that needle.”
• Why Pam & Tommy was made without Pamela Anderson's participation — or permission: From the very beginning of the process, the creative team wanted to contact Anderson to let her know they were very much on her side. "We particularly wanted to let Pamela Anderson know that this portrayal was very much a positive thing and that we cared a great deal about her and wanted her to know that the show loves her," says showrunner D.V. DeVincentis. "We didn't get a response, but considering what she's been through and the time that we were reaching out, that was understandable." Creator Rob Siegel adds: "I think if you had to name one person with whom the show's sympathies lie, it's Pam. And we're very much taking the side — when you tell people about the show and about the tape, when I bring up the subject of the tape and that I was doing a show about it, I was shocked by how many people assumed that (Anderson and Lee) were in on it, which is something I'm happy that we were able to set the record straight about. We very clearly, unambiguously present them as the victims of a crime, which they were." Siegel knows that a lot of people cynically assume that Anderson and Lee were the ones to leak and sell the sex tape. "But they weren't," he adds. "And we didn't make up a whole lot. Most of what you see in those eight episodes is in that article. The basic plot beats are all straight from the article."
• Pam & Tommy creator Rob Siegel recalls being editor of The Onion during the sex tape scandal, says the part about Pamela Anderson wanting to emulate Jane Fonda was fictionalized: "I don’t know what she actually thinks about Fonda, but the Barbarella track rang true," he says. "Realistically, I don’t think her career would’ve been radically different if the tape never surfaced. Barb Wire would’ve still flopped, but either way, her public persona remained the same. I watched every interview with Anderson I could find, and what’s striking is, if you close your eyes and listen, you wouldn’t know if it was 1996, 2000 or 2022. You can usually hear it in the voices of actors and public figures who’ve been chewed up and spit out, but not Pam. She always sounds fresh, joyous and light. I can’t say with any certainty how deep her psychic scars are, but I have to imagine it was a public survival mechanism. She gets knocked down, she gets up again. I thought Chumbawamba’s 'Tubthumping' could’ve been recontextualized and really work with the Pam & Tommy story we were telling. I was vetoed outright. Too many people hate it."
• Sebastian Stan was told to put two steel balls in his pants to prepare to play Tommy Lee: Stan told Jimmy Kimmel he reached out to acting coach Larry Moss, who once helped Helen Hunt with her role in As Good As It Gets. “He told Helen Hunt, ‘Put nickels in your shoes when you act so you know what it’s like to stand on your feet for 12 hours,’” Stan said. “I said, ‘Larry, I need something myself.’” When trying to figure out how to play Lee, the acting coach suggested Stan put two steel balls down his pants. Tommy was a big man,” the actor explained, “I know it sounds insane to you, but trust me, I was like, I need to kind of feel like a man.”
• Lily James was devasted to hear reports that Pamela Anderson didn't approve of Pam & Tommy: James had sought Anderson's blessing, but her inquiries were unanswered. As the Los Angeles Times notes, the 32-year-old James had spent the better part of a year transforming into the former Playmate, only to be left wondering: By making a TV program about how Anderson was exploited, was James simply adding to the exploitation? “I’m really sensitive to it,” says James. “I just know that my intentions — our intentions — were good. I would never have come on board if I didn’t think it was a worthy story to look at in order to provoke a conversation about how we treat women.” James says she’d only learned that Anderson wouldn’t be involved “quite late in the process,” and though she was “incredibly disappointed,” she’d channeled her feelings into a heightened sense of “responsibility to do absolutely everything I could to try and do her justice.”
• James says Pam & Tommy "felt big, bigger than anything I’d done before": "I think it sort of did take me by surprise," she says. "Often it does because when you’re working towards something you’re quite blinkered and I get very focused. So you sometimes are blissfully unaware of the reaction. But with this, it did feel extreme. I mean, obviously, Pamela Anderson is so iconic and Tommy and Pamela’s relationship was hugely in view and public. Because of what happened to them, I suppose. Definitely, there was something that came together in this project that was… It felt big, bigger than anything I’d done before." James adds: "I thought… this was a huge challenge for me as an actor. I really admire Pamela Anderson. I also felt when I read the scripts, I think our writers D.V. DeVincentis and Rob Siegel did an incredible job of exploring what happened to them, but also thinking of it in a wider context. And the show provokes… I think (it) asks questions of us and our own culpability as a society, as an audience… look at how this moment in time has impacted, with the birth of the internet, how we are now behaving as a culture. And it feels pretty big in scale and essential and timely. So I felt there was a lot more than meets the eye when it came to this project."