Pam & Tommy Is the Kind of Sharp, Funny, Class-Conscious Satire We Need
In Pam & Tommy, the story of the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape becomes an epic tale of thwarted American dreams.
Lily James playing Pamela Anderson in the Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy. (Hulu)
I’ve been enjoying Pam & Tommy, the eight-episode biographical comedy-drama currently running on Hulu. It’s about Pamela Anderson (Lily James) and her then-husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan), during the late 1990s brouhaha surrounding the unauthorized release of their honeymoon sex tape onto the then-relatively unexplored territory of the “World Wide Web.”
A schlubby ex-contractor named Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), fired by Lee in a rock-star snit after weeks of uncompensated work on Anderson and Lee’s “fucking futuristic state-of-the-art-love-pad” in Malibu, is the one who sets in motion the vengeful releasing of the tape, and then pays dearly for it by immediately getting in way over his head.
Director Craig Gillespie is reunited here with kinetic Sebastian Stan, who also played the hapless husband of Tonya Harding in Gillespie’s terrific satirical black comedy I, Tonya (2017). That one was about the Tonya Harding knee-capping scandal that rocked the world of figure skating and entertained the multitudes back in 1994.
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