When Disney+ began its global roll-out in late 2019, it was expected to drastically shake up the world of streaming. However, nobody could have foreseen a studio which, throughout its history, has served as a custodian of family values and as a wellspring of saccharine distraction would assail subscriber eyeballs with a scene in which a man talks, earnestly and at length, to his penis.
The penis talks back, too. The mumbling member pops up in a surreal sequence in episode two of Pam & Tommy (Disney+, streaming from Wednesday) in which bad-boy Mötley Crüe rocker Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) wonders if he's truly ready to fall in love with his new paramour, Baywatch star Pamela Anderson (Lily James). His heart says yes. Other body parts are inclined to take a pass.
Sheer grotesqueness of the tale is undercut by producer Seth Rogen's decision to cast himself as Gauthier
A raconteuring willy is one of the many treats awaiting in Disney’s gonzo retelling of the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex-tape scandal of the 1990s. Far from the withering deconstruction of late-20th-century sexism that might have been expected, Pam and Tommy has the crazy-eyed energy of a Mötley Crüe video and the weird zaniness of Baywatch, the exploitative TV show starring Anderson and her iconic red swimsuit.
Pam & Tommy is always watcheable and powerfully conveys the sense, in the 1990s, that the world was teetering on the brink of something new, strange and potentially dangerous. That new, strange and potentially dangerous thing was, of course, the internet. Which was the means by which carpenter-with-a-grudge Rand Gauthier distributed the Lee-Anderson sex tape he’d swiped from Lee’s safe.
Gauthier staged the heist after short-fused Lee pulled a gun on him when he has the cheek to request payment for his work on the musician’s mansion. Incredibly all of this actually happened. And yet, the sheer grotesqueness of the tale is undercut by producer Seth Rogen’s decision to cast himself as Gauthier.
Rogen is the high prince of the stoner romcom. His presence brings an unwelcome cartoonish energy. As the story delves into his history as an accidental porn star, Pam & Tommy begins to feel more like an X-rated yuck-fest rather than an exploration of what happens when misogyny, technology and capitalism intersect.
The best reason to keep watching is the chemistry between James and Stan as the golden couple. Pam & Tommy is far too keen to leer at Anderson and is often guilty of the old school toxicity that it is wants to decry. James does her best to push past the caricature of Anderson as tinsel town eye candy: a scene in which a creepy Baywatch executive adjusts the bum-crease in her swimsuit speaks, for instance, to the appalling sexism that was part of Hollywood then and now.
Stan is far less subtle. And yet his Lee is a one-note riot and there is a fascinating subplot in which Mötley Crüe – a posse of Sunset Strip ne'er do wells who made Guns N' Roses sound like the Philip Glass Ensemble – reckon with the purifying flames of Kurt Cobain and grunge.
In retelling the story as a farce rather than tragedy it undercuts its own point about how women are treated in the entertainment industry
Pam & Tommy is ultimately textbook three stars telly. It’s a lark and the performances, if never nuanced, are generally a hoot. But it’s nowhere near as insightful as it appears to believe.
In retelling the story as a farce rather than tragedy it undercuts its own point about how women are treated in the entertainment industry. Nor does it have anything to say about how the internet would, in the decades to follow, bring the walls of privacy tumbling down.
It’s far too silly to be serious.
