This article contains minor spoilers.
The first time viewers see actor Lily James as Pamela Anderson in Hulu’s new series “Pam & Tommy,” she is adorned in a spaghetti strap black dress, with her signature blonde curls tied in a perfectly tousled updo.
In the scene, James’ Anderson, clad with her infectious smile, is being interviewed by “The Tonight Show” host Jay Leno, who proclaims that he must ask her about her stolen sex tape with then-husband Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan).
“That [sex] tape,” Leno begins his inquiry. “Yup fellas, we all wanna know… What’s that like? What’s it like to have that kind of exposure?”
“What’s it like?” says James as Anderson, whose characteristic grin is quickly replaced with a look of visible disgust. “It’s horrible … It’s devastating.”
It is this disturbing scene that opens the biographical TV series, which premiered its first three episodes on Wednesday. The show is an attempt to re-examine the unauthorized release of Anderson’s and Lee’s sex tape, and the rampant misogyny and celebrity tabloid journalism that followed Anderson’s life and career thereafter.
The show is the latest addition to a growing list of works, including The New York Times’ documentary, “Framing Britney Spears“ and Lifetime and A&E’s four-part docu-series, “Janet Jackson,” that explores how the public images of young women were distorted by sexism and sensationalism of the news media in the ‘90s and early 2000s.
Pamela Anderson was demonized and vilified in the ‘90s, just like so many women that were covered by the mass media at the time.
– author Allison Yarrow, who specializes in ’90s celebrity culture.
“Pamela Anderson was demonized and vilified in the ‘90s, just like so many women that were covered by the mass media at the time,” said Allison Yarrow, the author of “90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality,” a book that reevaluated newsmakers such as Lorena Bobbitt and Tonya Harding.
“In the wake of the tape, [Lee] was celebrated and [Anderson] was called a slut, a whore, all these monikers that are thrown at women,” Yarrow said. “People believed that because she had participated in this very personal tape… she was somehow behind the presentation of it on the internet — but that was absolutely not the case.”
The show depicts ‘the greatest love story ever sold’
The marriage between Anderson and Lee is a story many people who grew up in the ’90s are all too familiar with — one that even Hulu billed as “the greatest love story ever sold.”
Anderson and Lee, two tabloid darlings, tied the knot in February 1995 after a four-day courtship in Cancún, Mexico.
At the time of their marriage, Yarrow said, Anderson was a “global sensation” known for her iconic role in “Baywatch” and frequent Playboy covers.
“She was cemented as a sexy actress and somebody who defined a very popular body type in the ‘90s: white, blond, thin, large-breasted, idolized by people,” Yarrow said.
That spring, a few months after they got married, the couple fired a handful of contractors who were renovating their mansion in Malibu, accusing them of shoddy work, according to a Rolling Stone story published in 2014, which became the inspiration for the series.
At some point, an electrician named Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen) and another worker returned to the couple’s mansion to pick up tools, but were confronted by Lee, who allegedly pointed a shotgun at the pair before yelling expletives to get off his property.
In the fall of 1995, Gauthier later returned to the property and pilfered a giant safe that contained the sex tape Anderson and Lee made on their honeymoon. Soon after, that cassette made its way to an adult video distributor where it was converted into many VHS copies and sold to eager buyers.
Lee and Anderson did not consent to the release of their intimate tape, and in 1996, they sued everyone they thought might have a copy, Rolling Stone reported.
By Nov. 7, 1997, then 25-year-old “internet wunderkind” Seth Warshavsky broadcast the sex tape on loop for five hours on his website, which prompted the couple to file a lawsuit against him, according to the magazine.
Lee and Anderson eventually decided to settle. They signed away the tape’s copyright and gave Warshavsky permission to show the tape on the internet but prevented him from selling it in stores, Rolling Stone reported. The decision proved to be to their detriment, as the couple severely underestimated the internet at the burgeoning height of the dot-com bubble.
In its first 12 months, the sex tape brought in a total of about $77 million for legal adult distributors, according to Rolling Stone.
Gauthier and Wachavsky did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On the tape’s legacy, Gauthier told Rolling Stone: “I made [Lee’s] career, is what happened.”
It’s a ‘sleazy opus an undeniable heart,’ critics say
In one fictionalized scene in the series, Anderson and Lee confront each other about the stark differences between the ramifications Lee would face in contrast to Anderson.
“You don’t seem to understand what a big deal this,” James as Anderson says.
“I’m on the tape just the same as you,” Stan as Lee said.
Anderson responds: “But this is worse for me.”
It’s that scene, among others, that has helped “Pam & Tommy” generate positive reviews, with some critics praising the series for showing how its characters were often used as fodder for jokes on late-night talk shows.
Rotten Tomatoes wrote that the show “sometimes undercuts its own critique of cultural voyeurism with lurid stylization, but Lily James’ performance gives this sleazy opus an undeniable heart.”
“As a dramatization of events that have slipped into history, ‘Pam & Tommy’ is part of a crowded genre,” Variety critic Daniel D’Addario wrote in a review. “But its curiosity and sensitivity toward its subjects set it apart.”
He added: “This series refreshes with its willingness to see in Anderson something other than a didactic moral lesson. She is, first, a person.”
Anderson and Lee were not involved in the making of the series
The series never got the greenlight from Anderson, who has also not spoken publicly about the show.
James, who plays Anderson, told the Los Angeles Times that she independently tried to speak with Anderson, but to no avail. In September, Lee told “Entertainment Tonight” that he spoke with Stan about the series and gave him his approval.
“From what [Stan] told me, it’s a really beautiful story,” Lee said. “I think a lot of people would think that it’s one thing, but it’s really about privacy and how things got crazy then.”
Representatives for Lee and Anderson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During a 2015 appearance on “Watch What Happens Live,” Anderson revealed that she has never seen the sex tape.
“I’ve never seen it. I made not one dollar. It was stolen property. We made a deal to stop all the shenanigans,” she said at the time. “I was seven months pregnant with Dylan and thinking it was affecting the pregnancy with the stress and said, ‘I’m not going to court anymore. I’m not being deposed anymore by these horny, weird lawyer men. I don’t want to talk about my vagina anymore or my public sex — anything.’”
And while she hasn’t commented on the show itself, Anderson has had people in her corner weigh in. In May 2021, when Hulu first released an image of James as Anderson, Courtney Love bashed the series, calling it outrageous.
“My heart goes out to Pammy further causing her complex trauma,” Love wrote in a Facebook post. A spokesperson Love did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
James told the Los Angeles Times that the show’s intentions, as well as her own as an actor, “were good.”
“I would never have come on board if I didn’t think it was a worthy story to look at in order to provoke a conversation about how we treat women,” she said.
On Jan. 26 — about a week before the series debuted — Anderson posted a photoof herself on her personal Instagram account, saying it would be her last post on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
“I’ve never been interested in social media,” she wrote. “And now that I’m settled into the life I’m genuinely inspired by reading and being in nature.”
“I’m free.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
