Pam & Tommy Isn’t About Pam At All.
There’s a storyline in the third episode of Pam & Tommy, which just dropped in a batch of three on Hulu and its international counterpart Disney+ (to much controversy) with single episodes to follow weekly, in which Pamela Anderson (Lily James) is excited about getting some meatier dialogue on Baywatch, the show that made her a household name.
“It’s the first time I’ve been given more than two lines in a row…,” she beams. “The camera’s going to finally be on my face for a change.”
But, alas, the producers go with what they know and cut her lines in favour of another red bathing suit-clad ass shot.
“We just thought it was stronger wordless,” an old white male producer tells Anderson before seemingly innocuously touching her arm in a way that reads workplace misconduct-like post-#MeToo.
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If Pam & Tommy could be summed up in one scene, it’s this one. Because despite her name coming first in the title of the show, Anderson is an afterthought to the men Pam & Tommy prioritises.
This is none more evident than in the first episode, which is from the perspective of handyman and one-time porn performer Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogan) after Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) stiffs (pardon the pun) Gauthier on money owed to him for work on Anderson and Lee’s mansion. In retaliation, Rand steals a safe containing their sex tape and the rest is history that the couple would rather put to bed but which Pam & Tommy insists on rehashing, to varying degrees of success.
The second episode, which follows Anderson and Lee’s whirlwind four-day courtship, features the infamous animatronic penis, which has more lines than Anderson does in the entire first episode. And while the prosthetics, particularly the breasts and whatever was done to James’s face to make her look so much like Anderson, are no doubt impressive, the focus on Anderson’s physicality casts her under the male gaze that the series purports to eschew. If we wanted to see Anderson’s tits, we would go and find them in one of the many nude pictorials and films in which she consensually bared them.
Pam & Tommy slightly shifts away from the perspectives of the men around her in later episodes which, it’s no coincidence, are directed by women. But I worry that many viewers will be turned off by the first three, which are directed by Craig Gillespie, who has a hit-and-miss track record of directing films I, Tonya (good) and Cruella (less so) and TV shows United States of Tara (good) and last year’s Physical (again, less so).
Pam & Tommy does a far better — and far more problematic — job of humanising Tommy Lee, played expertly by Sebastian Stan. There’s no screen time given to his physical abuse, which is dismissed in a two-line postscript. Gaulthier’s wife, played by Orange is the New Black’s Taylor Schilling, says that the sex tape makes her like Lee. Unfortunately, Pam & Tommy does this, too, which is part of a bigger problem with the show: it perpetuates what it attempts to critique.
Listening to a recent episode of the podcast You’re Wrong About — a show that has made maligned women of the ’90s its calling card — starring Jessica Chastain talking about her movie The Eyes of Tammy Faye, she said: “Why bring forward the tabloid media and these sensationalist stories that we all grew up with? That story’s been told on the cover of tabloids, it’s been told on SNL.”
That’s a question I’m left wondering when it comes to Pam & Tommy.
