(You don’t need hindsight to figure out that Pamela Anderson shouldn’t have hinged her movie-star hopes on something like “ Barb Wire.”) What’s more, James does a service to her subject by avoiding the tabloid caricature of Anderson as a dumb bimbo, instead playing her with a refreshing self-awareness and welcome ambition, as blinkered as it may be. While she doesn’t fully disappear into the role-Anderson, whatever you may say about her as a performer, is impossible to truly replicate-James’ physical transformation (including pouty lips, a breathy Marilyn Monroe whisper, and conspicuously ample chest plate) gets pretty close. It’s these components that work best, due in large part to James’ stunning lead turn as Pamela. But it’s hard not to feel that every time we cut away to see what pathetic shenanigans Rand’s up to (including, eventually, having to fashion himself into a reluctant mob enforcer for Andrew Dice Clay’s nasty loan shark), it takes significant time away from the real focus of the story: Pamela Anderson and the tape’s effect on her career, marriage, and life. It’s all very slick and diverting, but starts off the series with a breeziness that makes it harder for follow-up directors Lake Bell, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, and Hannah Fidell to bring down the hammer on the script’s justifiable cultural targets: sleazy TV producers, ogling fans and paparazzi, every craven opportunist who wants a piece of the pie.Īs an idiots-on-parade heist comedy, it sort of works-Rogen is always a reliable everyman, finding layers of likability in a dopey dude very clearly out of his depth and running entirely on impulse. He turns on that same approach here, cameras constantly weaving and coasting through the immaculately-rendered ‘90s world the costume and production designers have set for themselves. Naturally, it snowballs out of everyone’s control from there, the show flitting from subplot to subplot with nary a chance to develop most of them.Ī lot of the show’s barely-controlled chaos can be laid at the feet of “ I, Tonya” and “ Cruella” director Gillespie, who directs the first three episodes of the eight-episode series (and who never met a tracking shot or needle drop he didn’t like). Soon enough, he’s folded in an old porn-industry buddy, “Uncle” Miltie Ingley ( Nick Offerman), and together they start copying and selling the tapes on the Internet. (Doubly so when the person in question is a cultural sex symbol whose very existence makes men feel a sense of ownership of her body.) The show casts a wide net over all these concerns, bouncing between searing biopic drama and Coen brothers-esque dark comedy, and it doesn’t all work.īased on the 2014 Rolling Stone article on the subject, “Pam & Tommy” curiously starts not with its titular characters, but in the mind of the schlub who stole the sex tape in the first place: embittered contractor Rand Gauthier ( Seth Rogen), a working stiff and “amateur theologian” who justifies stealing the tape as vengeance for being bilked out of thousands by the volatile Tommy. But it’s also more broadly about the public’s relationship with celebrity, and the entitlement the average person feels to accessing the innermost lives of the people they see on TV. It’s a show about a very specific moment in history, where the ‘90s was set to change the world forever with the rise of celebrity gossip mags and the mass reach of the Internet.
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