TV Review: Hulu's 'Pam & Tommy' Fails to Justify its existence

When I told a friend that Hulu had made a series based on the stealing of the sex tape belonging to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee her response was a puzzled, “Why?” That simple one word question feels appropriate even after you have watched three episodes of Pam & Tommy, Hulu’s miniseries on the Pam and Tommy sex tape that was the first video to fully break the internet, in the colloquial sense. Written and directed by Craig Gillespie, the director of the similarly salacious, I, Tonya, Pam & Tommy is intended to be an absurd comic true crime story but it lands somewhere in the uncanny valley between good and bad satire.

I’ve seen the first three episodes of Pam & Tommy and I am not sure whether or not I will finish the series. Despite the considerable talent of Craig Gillespie and his tremendous cast, including Lily James as Pamela Anderson, Sebastian Stan as Tommy Lee and Seth Rogan and Nick Offerman as the bumbling porn entrepreneurs who capitalized on the early internet and the sale of the Pam and Tommy sex tape, the series fails to justify why it exists. Why did anyone want to tell this story?

Episode 1 Drilling and Pounding

The first episode of Pam & Tommy does not center on the title couple. Instead, we meet Rand Gauthier (Rogan), a contractor working on Pam and Tommy’s Malibu home. Rand is helping to build the Lee’s new sex dungeon which includes a fully built bed, a sex swing. and mirrors everywhere. What we learn very quickly is that working for Tommy Lee is not easy. For one, he refuses to pay up front, forcing the contractor to buy his own supplies, at great expense, to do the job. Tommy also changes his mind a lot forcing the contractors to tear apart days and hours of work to meet his whims.

Rand has gone deeply into debt on this job but when he asks Tommy for payment to continue the job, Tommy threatens him and then fires him. Thus begins Rand’s quest for revenge on Tommy Lee. Rand spends weeks planning and scheming and finally decides to break into Lee’s mansion and take what he can as payment for the work he’d done. This entails stealing a large safe that he hopes is full of cash. What Rand finds inside is something he did not expect, a tape of Tommy and his wife, Pamela Anderson having explicit sex.

Drilling and Pounding, get it, it’s a double entendre, HA, sets an absurd and broad comic tone. Rogen’s loser contractor is sad and pathetic with a terrible 90s wig and a childlike naivety. Sebastian Stan’s take on Tommy Lee is obnoxious and oblivious, an unflattering portrayal for sure but one intended to explain why Rogen’s Rand decided he needed revenge on this guy and why we might root for him even as what he’s doing is undeniably wrong. Gillespie is going for a tricky comic tone, a dark and absurd sort of humor but what we get is more of a bland re-enactment of events well suited to a crime reenactment on a lost episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

The tone of episode one is consistent but it’s never very entertaining and it fails to explain why we should care about this story or these characters. Rogen’s innate likability is a problem because as much as Tommy Lee may have antagonized this guy, it doesn’t justify revenge porn as payback. The series doesn’t know whether to take seriously what happened or lean further into the absurdity and that indecisiveness plagues this and all three episodes of Pam & Tommy I’ve watched.

Episode 2 I Love You Tommy

The second episode of Pam & Tommy focuses on how Pam and Tommy met, quickly fell in love, and got married. Episode 2 is where we get to see Lily James and her uncanny impression of Pamela Anderson. James is consistently the best thing about all three episodes of Pam & Tommy with her brave approach to nudity and sex and how she creates a realistic portrait of Pamela Anderson as someone with dreams who got swept up in things out of her control. The series is incredibly kind to Pamela Anderson who comes off as the most human and vulnerable of the characters in Pam & Tommy.

But then, any kind of dramatic or character grounding we get is completely forgotten once we watch Sebastian Stan as Tommy Lee have a lengthy conversation with his prosthetic penis, voiced by guest star Jason Mantzoukas. It’s hard to invest in a movie where we get a glimpse of a whirlwind celebrity romance in warts and all detail and then we watch a scene where a man and a fake penis have a conversation about love and commitment. In the scene, Tommy explains to his penis that he’s in love with Pam and he’s giving up all other women, something his penis is very much against.

Where do we go from here? A conversation with a man and his penis is a real conversation stopping point. Either, you are intrigued to see what this scene looks like or you are already done with this series before ever watching it. Either you want to see a conversation between a man and his penis or you are looking for other things to watch. Is the scene funny? No, not really. Mantzoukas does his best to provide a comic voice to the penis and Sebastian Stan embraces the lunacy of the moment, but the dialogue is nothing special. I should have been laughing but instead I was mildly amused at the absurdity and thinking about better things I could be doing with my time.

Episode 3 Jane Fonda

Poor Jane Fonda, what did she ever do to deserve having an episode named for her in this context. The title comes from Anderson who tells an agent working on her film debut, Barb Wire, that her career role model is Jane Fonda. Pam hopes that Barb Wire will be her Barbarella, a sexy, funny, weird cult movie that will establish her as a star as Barbarella helped Jane establish herself as a draw. This has little to do with the rest of the plot of this episode but Lily James is quite good in the scene as she lays out Pamela’s ultimately outsized ambition. James is giving us pathos and the series is treating her dream as something of a punchline and the two tones clash.

Are we laughing at Pamela Anderson’s dreams of being taken seriously or are we supposed to sympathize with her while we know she was never a very good actress? The episode is unclear where our sympathies reside versus the mostly true story that is playing out. Pamela Anderson dreaming of being the next Jane Fonda isn’t funny when Lily James makes her so sympathetic and sweet. It doesn’t feel right to chuckle at her expense but then, what is the point of the scene if it isn’t intended to be darkly humorous or pathetic like the rest of the episode?

Episode 3 is the first that shifts regularly between what Pam and Tommy are doing and what’s happening in Rand’s plot. In Rand’s plot he has partnered with a porn producer named Uncle Miltie (Nick Offerman) to try and sell the Pam and Tommy sex tape. We follow along as the pair are laughed out of every porn distribution company in L.A, none of which want to get sued by a rock star, before they finally settle on distributing the tape themselves via the internet. The internet was in its relative infancy in the mid-1990s and thus it provided anonymity and immediacy for a price the two could afford, free.

Episode 3 spins its wheels as it develops these stories and includes a subplot about Rand’s failed relationship with Erica (Taylor Schilling). The subplot adds nothing to the episode or the series. It’s sad and pathetic, but everything about Rand as a character is sad and pathetic. The editing which flashes through their relationship from introduction to their divorce in the span of 5 years, I think, is so bad that I honestly have no idea what actually happened. I can recall a flash of a scene where it appears that Rand is signing divorce papers, but how we got to this scene is an indecipherable mess. That may be partially my own fault however, I really lost interest in the series in this episode and I may have looked away as important details of this plot happened. That is, if there was anything of importance in this subplot. It's intended to further flesh out Rand as a character but by this point, we already understand that he's a pathetic mess. This subplot only serves to unnecessarily pad out this episode.

Overview

The problem with Pam & Tommy is a lack of perspective. Are we laughing at this absurd story or are we supposed to treat this with seriousness? Pamela Anderson is a sympathetic character in Pam and Tommy but Tommy Lee is most certainly not sympathetic. Rand is pathetic but he’s also clearly been wronged and bullied by Tommy Lee which makes him kind of sympathetic. But Rand’s actions are those of a true scumbag and Seth Rogen’s likable performance is gravely at odds with the scumminess of Rand.

Pam & Tommy is neither drama or comedy, it’s not sympathetic to Pam and Tommy and but it’s not a full on send up of the celebrity couple either. The aesthetic of the documentary is intended to evoke the 1990s but it winds up evoking the aesthetic of a reenactment on a salacious true crime show. So what is Pam and Tommy supposed to be? It’s not funny, it’s not dramatic, it features a conversation between a man and his penis so comedy seems to be the aim but nothing in the first three episodes of Pam and Tommy is more than mildly amusing.

Worst of all regarding Pam & Tommy is that it never justifies why it exists. Craig Gillespie never gives a hint as to why he wanted to tell this story. Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee aren’t exactly the most top of mind celebrities in the world these days so timeliness is not the aim here. So what was it? It’s certainly an outlandish and absurd story but the series is far too flat to capture just how outlandish and absurd this story is.

The Pam and Tommy sex tape is a precedent setting case in the birth of the early internet but that’s not really the subject of Pam & Tommy. The internet is very much a secondary character in the third episode. Perhaps that idea picks up steam in the next five episodes and we can get to the heart of why this story is relevant today but I don’t think I am interested enough after the first three, deeply uneven and downright strange episodes of Pam & Tommy to want to keep watching.

Pam & Tommy debuts all 8 episodes on Hulu on February 2nd, 2022.