The first episode of “Pam & Tommy,” Hulu’s wild ride of a biopic TV series about the early years of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s marriage and their stolen sex tape, is titled “Drilling and Pounding.” There’s all kinds of home renovation going on in their mansion, see, and if you somehow didn’t get the smirky-winky double entendre, the episode features Seth Rogen in a splendiferous mullet as Rand Gauthier, a carpenter working in the couple’s Malibu home (who would eventually steal their sex tape and distribute it), going to town with a nail gun downstairs while the newlyweds are upstairs audibly taking the episode’s title to heart.
That Gauthier was an electrician in real life rather than a carpenter is probably too inconvenient to mention and ruins the nail gun joke that, as a scene-setters go, is laying it on pretty thick. The thing about “Pam & Tommy” is that it wants to have fun right up until it wants to be serious. The tonal clash is intentional, between the whirlwind mid-’90s romance of the “Baywatch” star and Motley Crue drummer — fueled by sex, drugs and a raucous courtship in Cancun — to something distinctly stomach curdling when their private homemade tape becomes a very public obsession. I get the idea behind the show’s structure, I’m just not sure it actually works.
That’s because so much of it focuses on Gauthier, presented here as a shambling sad sack whose motives are given a lot of consideration. (For the sake of clarity, I’ll refer to the real-world people by their last names and their characters by their first names.) When Lee fired Gauthier, refused to pay his outstanding bill and also apparently pointed a shotgun at the guy, a revenge fantasy was plotted into a reality and this is worthy context — to a point. But Pam and Tommy — you know, the two victims of the crime — are sometimes disconcertingly sidelined in this retelling.
