To think, a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided if Tommy Lee had just paid his carpenter.
Then his sex tape with Pamela Anderson would have never gotten out. Then maybe the words "sex tape" don't enter our lexicon, and Paris Hilton doesn't have one as well. And then maybe the Kardashians, well, after the O.J. Simpson trial, we just don't hear that name ever again.
Alas, that's not how it went down.
"Pam & Tommy," the new eight-episode Hulu series (premiering Wednesday), is a bubbly pop soap opera about sex, celebrity, videotape, rock and roll, crime, more sex, the '90s and the internet.
On one hand there's an aw-shucks innocence to it, in that it unfolds in an era when the internet was still in its infancy and things didn't instantly go viral, they creeped out slowly across the culture.
On the other hand, it's a precursor to so much of our online behavior, the advent of social media and our obsession with the private lives of celebrities. Once that tape hit, there was no looking back. And if it was going to be anyone to usher in this new age, it might as well have have been Pam & Tommy.
In a feat of modern makeup, Lily James ("Cinderella") is styled and contoured into a dead ringer for '90s bombshell sex goddess Pamela Anderson, and Sebastian Stan (Marvel's Winter Soldier) is Tommy Lee, the wild child drummer for '80s Sunset Strip rockers Motley Crue.
Stan isn't as tall or lanky as Lee — Colson "Machine Gun Kelly" Baker was a better physical match for Lee in 2019's Crue biopic "The Dirt" — but he does an admirable job of zeroing in on Lee's bro'd-out, metal dude essence. (In one scene he has a conversation with his, er, member, an inspired piece of fantastical lunacy.)
"Sup, broskees?" Those are Stan-as-Tommy's first words in "Pam & Tommy," as he greets the crew working on remodeling the bedroom of his Malibu home wearing nothing but a man thong and a body full of tattoos. It's 1995 and the couple has just met and wed in a whirlwind romance that was capped by a beachside wedding, where "Baywatch" star Anderson said "I do" while sporting a white bikini before jumping into the ocean with her new groom.
Tommy's got some notes for the home renovation crew, which includes Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), a down-on-his luck carpenter whom Tommy asks to change the location of his bed, and to go ahead and make it a waterbed while he's at it.
That's going to cost a fortune, and Tommy already owes the crew about $25,000, but he's good for it, he tells them, and orders them to continue working. When Rand demands to be paid up front, Tommy fires him on the spot, and as a thank you, he shoves a shotgun in his face.
Hey man, that's rock and roll. But Rand has been kicked around his whole life, and he decides now is the time he's not going to take it lying down.
He hatches a revenge plot and breaks into the happy couple's home and steals a safe which he figures contains enough valuables to make back the money he's owed. What he's not aware of is the safe contains private home movies of Anderson and Lee that will help alter the course of human existence.
Or at least send shock waves through the celebrity industrial complex, of which Anderson and Lee were very much a part in the mid-1990s.
Rand teams up with a skin flick maestro known as Uncle Miltie (Nick Offerman) to try and figure out what to do with the tape. No distributors will touch it, because it was stolen. So Rand decides to sell it online: not stream it, because the internet is too new for that, but to set up a website where people can order VHS copies of it. He figures it's a genius plan.
It's not. The tape is widely bootlegged and Rand ends up owing money to a mobster, Butchie (Andrew Dice Clay), whom he partnered with to front the cash. And meantime, Pam and Tommy are trying to stop the tape from spreading, as Pam suffers emotional trauma from its dissemination and Tommy, ever loving but not the most emotionally mature individual, tries to support his new wife as best he can.
"Pam & Tommy's" creative team includes writer Robert D. Siegel ("The Wrestler"), director Craig Gillespie (who waded into similar celebrity scandal waters with "I, Tonya," also with Stan) and Rogen, who developed the series with his creative partner Evan Goldberg.
It uses the sex tape at the center of the story to spin a web that touches on Anderson's dreams of being a credible actress (she auditioned for "L.A. Confidential," losing the role to Kim Basinger, not that she was ever going to get it); Motley Crue's struggles in the '90s against the tidal wave of grunge; the broken dreams of L.A.'s side players; growing issues over privacy as it relates to paparazzi; and America's relationship with sex and celebrity.
It's also very much a love story between the two title characters, and a rather sweet one at that. Anderson has just sworn off bad boys when Tommy comes barging into her life — of course they meet at a nightclub, over shots — and the pair completes each other, in a weird way: the rock star and the beach babe.
They don't know a single thing about each other other than they're really attracted to each other, a hard fact they learn on the plane ride home from their honeymoon. But they're doofuses in love, and "Pam & Tommy" doesn't make fun of them or their relationship, but shows it for what it is: a match made in the stars.
James' physical transformation is astounding (she's aided considerably by prosthetics), and she finds the warmth within Pam, the naïve small town girl with dreams that perhaps outweighed her talents. Stan is clearly going for it in the role of Tommy, and he softens some of the rocker's harder features and less desirable traits; he makes him lovable.
"Pam & Tommy" recalls "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story" in the way it dramatizes a piece of recent history and helps us process it through a modern lens. Pam and Tommy's sex tape drew a line in the sand: it's not as if it was the end of the innocence, but looking back, we would never get that innocent again.
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'PAM & TOMMY'
Grade: B
Rating: TV-MA
Where to watch: Premieres Wednesday on Hulu
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