What does Pam & Tommy (Disney Plus) want to be? Despite their notoriety, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee are not obvious subjects for an eight-episode bells-and-whistles biopic series. Their union was short and unhappy. The Baywatch actress and Motley Crue drummer were married in Cancun in 1995, four days after they met. They had two sons, but divorced in 1998, when Lee was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting her. In the public imagination, they are forever associated with the sex tape, made on their honeymoon and leaked by Rand Gauthier, a disgruntled contractor working on their house, who stole the tape and sold it. Not exactly a laugh a minute.
It makes an interesting companion piece to the BBC’s A Very British Scandal, which used a miserable marriage with a notorious sex act at its heart to tell a wider story about class and gender relations in Britain after the war. In the opening scenes of Pam & Tommy, we see Anderson (Lily James) on the Jay Leno talk show. He asks her about the tape, with a kind of knowing locker-room leer. Is this a period piece about the final moment before everyone and their uncle recorded all their activities, clothed or otherwise, and broadcast them 24/7 on the internet? Or perhaps it is going to be a Nineties morality tale, in which Anderson is a kind of proto-Britney, objectified and exploited by every man she encounters.
