‘Pam & Tommy’ Turns the Infamous Sex Tape Scandal Into a Poignant Pop Culture Saga

Alci Rengifo

Privacy has disappeared in the digital age. We are all aware that nearly anything we do can become an item to watch online. Hulu’s limited series, “Pam & Tommy,” reminds us that the first real victims of this reality were Pamela Anderson and then-husband Tommy Lee. It was the tragic fate of the model-actor and her rock star husband to gain infamy in the 1990s when a tape of their most intimate sexual moments was stolen and turned into a new form of cultural phenomenon. Nostalgic programming has been making a habit of trying to link their dramatized events to nearly anything happening now. “Pam & Tommy” does make a convincing case for tracing much of the tabloid and sexual evolution of the internet to Anderson and Lee’s video camera. A welcome surprise is how it manages to also bring some poignancy and empathy to its players.

History has a way of bringing wildly different people together. Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), is a contractor working on a ludicrously grand expansion project to the three-story Malibu home belonging to Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) and Pamela Anderson (Lily James). The Mötley Crüe drummer loves throwing his weight around, sometimes while brandishing his guns. He also happens to be quite bored these days while Anderson’s fame is rising, thanks to the stardom of being a Playboy model and a fixture on the smash TV show “Baywatch.” After throwing a tantrum, Lee fires Rand and refuses to pay him. When Rand returns to get his tools, Lee confronts him with a shotgun. Embittered, Rand devises a way to break into the mansion and steal Lee’s safe, which he knows is kept in the garage. After the break-in, what Rand, a former porn star, finds inside along with guns and cash, is the Lee’s honeymoon sex tape. Rand takes the tape to a porn producer, Miltie (Nick Offerman). They devise a way to make money off the tape by selling it on a new but expanding technology, the internet. The video quickly spreads, just in time for the release of Anderson’s first major action movie, “Barb Wire.”

“Pam & Tommy” is the stuff of lurid amusement, but it works as much more than that. Both showrunner Robert Siegel and Craig Gillespie, who directs several episodes, know how to take a headline and find the feverish human drama underneath. Siegel wrote sports drama “The Wrestler,” and “The Founder,” about the rise of McDonald’s, and Gillespie directed “I, Tonya,” a visually kinetic take on the notorious story of figure skater Tonya Harding. Their main source is a 2014 Rolling Stone article, “Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape,” by Amanda Chicago Lewis. “Pam & Tommy” is about the sex tape and about the love story of its two celebrities, while framing it all as a portrait of people pulled together by many things that define American dreaming, like fame and money. The internet becomes the force that promises prominence along with humiliation for all involved. Like Lewis’s article, this series is endlessly fascinating purely on its personalities. A place like Los Angeles is full of Rands, people who have undergone surreal journeys and then somehow clash with the city’s famous sector. He’s still in love with his porn star wife, Erica (Taylor Schilling), who pities him enough to keep waiting on Rand to come up with the money needed to finalize their divorce. He’s so clueless that it never dawns on him that releasing a private videotape, even of a famous couple, could constitute as a violation of privacy. When various porn distributors keep asking if the Lees ever signed a release, Rand and Miltie are genuinely confused. Then again, at the time it was a rare occurrence. 

Ironically enough, the more human element of “Pam & Tommy” has its own voyeur angle. Anderson and Lee are sketched vividly as more than tabloid caricatures. Gillespie has fun with moments of debauched visual experiments, like a scene inspired by Lee’s own memoirs, where he has a conversation with his famously large penis. After meeting Anderson by chance during a night club outing, Lee seems to genuinely fall in love with her and chases her down to a photo shoot in Cancun. After debating his penis over the merits of settling down, instead of continuing to reap the rewards of cock rocker status, the rock star proposes to Anderson, followed days after by a beach side wedding. Lily James and Sebastian Stan carry out one of the year’s first great TV transformations. They fully channel Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, not as imitations, but as real interpretations of these particular people. James captures a sweetness to Anderson combined with a growing sense of self-worth. She’s not some ditzy model but a hard worker who would like to be taken seriously. Her dreams for “Barb Wire” are that it will propel her to eventual respectability, in the way Jane Fonda went from the sex symbol of “Barbarella” to an activist and acclaimed actor. Sebastian Stan brings to Tommy Lee the immaturity of becoming rich and famous too young, with a dangerous temper. Yet he’s not a total savage. Lee really does care for Anderson and realizes she’s a genuinely special person. He is also a victim of being a musician amid shifting times. The writing gives him the complex insecurity of loving Anderson while feeling left behind by her rising stardom. She’s away, constantly shooting, while he’s at home desperate for her to come back so they can go on some fun adventure. It’s the ‘90s and grunge and alt-rock has overthrown hair metal and the testosterone-pumped music of the ‘80s. When Mötley Crüe get together to record their album “Generation Swine,” they are shocked to discover their preferred studio has been booked for Third Eye Blind.

Once the couple’s tape catches on all over the world, the series takes on a challenging, more layered approach. There’s the whacky side to how Rand and Miltie cut deals with a local mobster, Butchie (Andrew Dice Clay) for distribution, or how Penthouse owner Bob Guccione acquired a copy. Biker gangs and private investigators get involved with trying to track the tape down. The cinematography is energetic and the soundtrack propels everything forward with ‘90s hits and older classics. Yet Siegel and Gillespie find some poignancy in all this tabloid opera by shifting the focus to how the video also stirred the waters at a time when Pamela Anderson could be slut-shamed, while Tommy Lee felt a different kind of humiliation.  Anderson has to explain to her husband how he will get high fives from all the men they encounter in public, while she will be judged for already having worked using her body. The Tonight Show host Jay Leno once again embodies the kind of sexist humor famous women endured at the time, as we also saw recently in Ryan Murphy’s “Impeachment” about the Lewinsky scandal. Humor is balanced out by pain. Rand has to face he’s always going to be a loser, attaining some money and then being overshadowed by video bootleggers. Anderson realizes she may never be taken seriously. Even camera crews on the “Baywatch” set watch the tape with glee.

“Pam & Tommy” can sometimes threaten to crush under the weight of all the themes it seeks to explore. There is also a particular kind of brilliance in how a rather poignant epic is culled from such a notorious pop culture moment. After the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee video a new kind of sexual revolution began among the famous. Without Rand cracking open that safe, there might have never been the sex video episodes that would follow involving Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. On a wider scale it revolutionized porn. Eventually Anderson and Lee face the prospect of simply signing over the rights of the video to a new website offering to charge viewers. It was an early lesson in the real power of the internet as well, when suddenly nobody’s privacy would ever be secure again, no matter how many albums you sold. However, it has a unique human touch. Here Pamela Anderson becomes a different kind of pop culture figure, doomed to not reach the heights of movie respectability she craved, and defined by having her intimacy turned into cyberspace history for everyone to see.

“Pam & Tommy” begins streaming Feb. 2 with new episodes premiering Wednesdays on Hulu.