Pam & Tommy
*** (Three stars)
by Emily Carver
Feb. 21, 2022
In the new Hulu show "Pam & Tommy," Lily James and Sebastian Stan star as the couple, telling the “love story” of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.
Though, it is still a question: is this really a love story? Thus far into the show it is shown of the attempt to romanticize the two's relationship. The show is very obviously team Pamela however, there is no information about whether Pamela Anderson actually gave permission to make the show. Which goes against the purpose of the show, they wanted to create this show in hopes of bringing light to Pamela Anderson’s horrible situation. It’s important to also underline that this show is for mature audiences.
That being said, I do think that the show does a good job of showing the sexism that happened to Pamela. For instance, in the show, a magazine wants to run pictures from a private tape the couple owned. This drives Tommy to want to sue them. However, Pamela doesn’t want to. The scene changes to Pamela and Tommy in a room full of the lawyers basically telling Pamela the thing to do is sue. She doesn’t want to because it would bring even more attention to the tape. Tommy convinces her to go through with it. I didn’t think anything about this until later in the show when Pamela’s publicist, Gail, finds out she was planning to sue the magazine. Pamela confides in Gail by telling her “Well, you try saying no to a room full of men.” Gail follows with a rebuttal, “It’s not easy for any woman. We are programmed from birth to say yes to men, but it is a skill you gotta learn.”
Likewise, within this show you can really tell that this tape being leak, her miscarriage, and overall the media sexualizing her really gets to her. This is where we see Tommy being the not-so-loving boyfriend that we see at the beginning of the show. Where he is borderline gaslighting and manipulating Pamela by saying, “I feel like nothing I do is good enough for you.” and earlier in the show he says “Besides it’s not like they’re seeing anything they haven’t seen before.” Also, Tommy seems as if he is a bit jealous of Pamela. His band isn’t doing as well as they were a couple years ago while her career is starting to drift in the right direction with Barb Wire. This is apparent when Tommy and Pamela are talking about the tape and how much worse it is for Pamela, in which it is, when Tommy expresses, “How’s this worse for you? Why? Cause of your big career?”
What I’m hoping for in future episodes is finishing off the story by showing more of how abusive Tommy was to Pamela because so far we’ve only seen a small part of it. It also shows the audience that wasn’t familiar with their story that this isn’t at all a cute little story between a model and a rockstar.
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