The Problem with Pam & Tommy
Pam & Tommy is an original Hulu mini series that premiered on February 2, 2022. The eight-episode limited series focuses on “the greatest love story ever told”: the short and tumultuous marriage between actress Pamela Anderson and rockstar Tommy Lee following the release of a stolen sex tape of the two on the internet in the late 1990s. It features a star studded cast with Lily James playing Pam, Sebastian Stan as Tommy, Seth Rogan as the carpenter Rand Gautier, and Nick Offerman as Milton “Miltie” Ingley. Following its three-episode world premiere, Pam & Tommy was met with critical acclaim, especially towards James and Stan’s performances. While their performances were indeed great, I still can’t help but ask why the series even needed to be made.
There were three reasons behind the creation of Pam & Tommy, four if you count profit: one, to tell the story of Rand Gautier, the disgruntled carpenter who originally stole Anderson and Lee’s sex tape from their house and sold it for revenge, and two, to tell the story of Pamela and Tommy’s short-lived marriage soured by fame and the lack of privacy that comes along with paparrazi. The third, and seemingly most prevalent reason, being to demonstrate how the world and the United States justice system demonized Pamela Anderson in the public eye. In an interview with Variety, creator Robert Siegel claimed the hero of the show was Anderson herself and that they "tried to do right by her” to tell her story “properly” (Schnieder). In the same interview, executive producer Sue Naegle similarly argued that Pam & Tommy was a way of showing that the tape and the story behind it was “nobody’s business, it was nobody’s right”.
Ironically, the series does the exact opposite of what the creators claim it was meant to do. In the series, Anderson’s character wants nothing more than for the drama and buzz surrounding the tape to go away. It’s been over 25 years since then and if anything, this mini series brings all the attention back to an incredibly difficult time for the actress. In the same way the original distribution and exhibition of this tape was “nobody’s business”, so was this series. No one had asked to see this story. It was not anyone’s story to tell, aside from Anderson and Lee themselves. The show wanted to “do right” by Anderson, yet she was never involved in the production, nor did she want to be. Pam & Tommy exploits her image and capitalizes on her trauma on the premise of making her the “hero”. However the show fails to recognize that there are no “heroes” here, just people who got their privacy stolen from them over and over again.
Interestingly enough, while the show is supposed to be Anderson and Lee, it spends a lot of time sympathizing with the man who stole the tapes and put them out for the whole world to see. Pam & Tommy gives Rand Gauthier a backstory, his own plot line, and even attempts at a redemption arc. Rogen, who plays Gauthier, expressed that he wanted to play Gauthier as someone who wasn’t a methodical evil genius, but rather someone who just didn’t think how his actions would affect people. The same could be said about those behind this entire series, people who didn’t think about how the production would affect the people it's supposedly redeeming.
So how was Pam & Tommy able to be made and successfully avoid any legal trouble? Unsurprisingly, they followed a similar path that Rand Gautier did in distributing the original tape. Hulu never received signed releases from Anderson or Lee. Instead, they took to the internet, where they found the Rolling Stone article, "Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Sex Tape" by Amanda Chicago Lewis, and used it as their source material. Since this article is what the show claims to be based on, and not Anderson and Lee themselves, it successfully avoids a lawsuit and is considered to be commentary.
This isn’t the first time a film has done this either. The Social Network and Dark Waters are hit films that are based on outside source materials, and Hulu is doing the exact same thing in basing the recently released series The Dropout on a podcast of the same name. However, none of these projects sexualize the same person they claim to be honoring. Pamela Anderson is still being objectified and violated without any say - it's almost as if no one wants her to move on.
To make matters worse, since Hulu has partnered with Disney+, Pam & Tommy can be streamed internationally, drawing a whole new audience to the tape like never before. Rather than being a social critique about how Anderson was treated in the 90s, Pam & Tommy feels more like a malicious joke, showing that even decades later, Pamela Anderson is still viewed as public property. Her body and private life are once again treated as mere topics open for public opinion and discussion, with Anderson herself left out of the conversation. For a show that criticizes how men in the past have profited off Pamela Anderson without her consent, the cast and crew seem to have no problem doing the same thing 25 years later, in the name of feminism.
If the person who the show was made for wants nothing to do with it, then the question must be asked: who is it for?
