Pam and Tommy review: Miniseries falls prey to the same kind of objectification it quite flamboyantly critiques

Language: English

The Hulu miniseries _Pam and Tommy_ (streaming in India at Hotstar) is based on one of the most infamous media scandals in America in the 1990s — the theft and illegal distribution of a sex tape featuring Baywatch star Pamela Anderson and her then-husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. There are a lot of things going for this show, straight off the bat: great music, breathless editing to match a frenetic story and great performances by charismatic leads (Lily James and Sebastian Stan) whose physical appearances, mannerisms et al are exactly right.

James and Stan both pull off impressive transformations, it has to be said.

The rest of the cast pulls its weight admirably, too: Seth Rogen is in excellent form as the mousy, emasculated Rand Gauthier, the contractor who steals the tape in the first place. Nick Offerman is droll and as inscrutably funny as ever as ‘Uncle Miltie’ the pornographer. Taylor Schilling rounds off an excellent set of leads as Gauthier’s estranged wife Erica, who happens to be a porn star.

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After a somewhat start-and-stop opening episode, the show even starts to show off, in a manner of speaking. A drug-addled Tommy has a conversation with his animatronic penis—voiced by Jason Mantzoukas from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The penis tries to convince him not to marry Anderson, a woman he has met just a couple of months ago. It’s a gag that has no business working as well as it does. A lot of this is down to Mantzoukas’ voice-acting talents (he was excellent in a recent voice role in Amazon’s animated show Invincible), of course but you can tell that the writers knew they were taking a punt.

Pam and Tommy arrives at a time when we’re taking stock of how the media landscape of the 1990s treated young women in the public glare. Britney Spears freed herself from an unfair conservatorship and we were all reading and sharing old news clips, talk show clips, MTV clips that showed the gross hyper-sexualisation of a teenager. Jessica Simpson released her memoir and it was damning as it was well-written. In neither scenario did male celebrities come across too well—Justin Timberlake, John Mayer, the list goes on.

To that extent, the show has its heart in the right place—except it cannot resist often falling prey to the same kind of objectification it critiques quite flamboyantly. The latter episodes depict Pamela with great compassion and you can tell that the writers are firmly in her corner, so to speak. Starting with Rand and ending, inevitably, with Tommy, a succession of men are looking to profit from the tape, in one way or another. Even Jay Leno cannot resist making an off-kilter joke when Anderson is a guest on his show. That particular scene opens Pam and Tommy, and it’s a powerful moment in its own right.

However — and here’s where we start to get into the ethical issues around Pam and Tommy — there’s a lot that the show gets wrong, too. Did it need to recreate the sex tape with Stan and James and a whole lot of industrial-grade prosthetics? It did not. Did it need to recreate moments from the infamous boat? It did not. Did it need to feature stylised montages of Stan and James having sex at various places across their mansion? It did not. Each of these choices, and several others just like it, undercut the show in a more efficient manner than professional criticism ever could.

All of which builds up towards the elephant in the room—a show where consent is such a big part of the conversation was produced without Pamela Anderson’s consent. Now, whichever way you cut it (and I am generally sympathetic towards the ‘team sport’ interpretation of films and shows) a biographical story that sought to recreate moments of great trauma should have done better. They bypassed the legal need to acquire her consent by instead buying the rights of to a longform Rolling Stone article about the entire sequence of events, including the eventual lawsuit (this is becoming a common Hollywood tactic, by the way). These are not the actions of a show that allegedly cares about Anderson (as the makers have reiterated in interviews and tweets).

Pam and Tommy is entertaining in a formulaic way, if a little voyeuristic in parts. It’s decently written, brilliantly performed — and it absolutely should not have existed in the first place, to be honest.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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