The first three episodes of Pam & Tommy were directed by Craig Gillespie, who has helmed award-nominated fare like I, Tonya and Lars and the Real Girl. There are creative elements that signal this is prestige TV, even before you reckon with the subject matter and the subjects themselves: two celebrities whose notoriety and image-as judged by society-mean they’ve hardly been taken seriously over the years, let alone in a manner that would predict they’d be mentioned in the same breath as what we consider “prestige.” Yet that is precisely what this is-and it was only a matter of time before we got here.
It is an astounding, and yet perfect, sign of how the medium has so rapidly evolved that a series centered around Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee’s infamous 1995 sex tape is considered prestige television. But I also bring it up because it exemplifies the canny, winking, and frankly brilliant approach Pam & Tommy takes to telling this story. I bring up this sequence because it is obviously insane. Lots of sex ensues, including a honeymoon captured on a camcorder. They wed on a beach after knowing each other for just four days. “You make Jenna Jameson look like a four!” He gets down on one knee. “Next to you, Carmen Electra is a hack!” he bellows. (The evening prior was all naked cuddling.)Ĭut to, seconds later, a marriage proposal, made dramatically at a raucous night club. He’s so devoted that he wants to wait until his and Pam’s potential wedding night to have sex. “You’re passing on Denise fucking Richards?”īut Tommy will not be swayed by his dick’s grand ovations.
At this point in Tommy Lee’s life, he is recently divorced from actress Heather Locklear, and Conscience Cock doesn’t want Tommy to go all-in on his infatuation with Pam while they’re still aboard their “pussy train.” “What about Jenny McCarthy?” the penis pleads. Think of it as a phallic conscience, or Tommy’s own, hornier Jiminy Cricket. The next morning, he and his talking penis, voiced by Jason Mantzoukas, have a heart-to-heart. (Both performers are otherwise more than generous with their own nudity.)Īfter Pam and Tommy spend their first night together, he’s smitten. It is, of course, a prosthetic worn by actor Sebastian Stan, of prodigious size to rival the breastplate actress Lily James wears to approximate Pam’s signature bust. The camera pans down, revealing a gasp-inducing member-one that probably requires no further description, thanks to the tape that is at the center of Pam & Tommy’s narrative. When Pam is naked and all that’s left is for Tommy to drop trou, he teases, “Would you like to meet him?” She’s thrilled: “Yes, I would.” After some intense flirting, Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, the sex-rebel couple behind the brightest-burning romantic fairy tale of the ’90s, are finally in the bedroom together. The trippy, dare I say transcendent, moment comes in the second episode of the series, which launched Wednesday. It is around the time that Tommy Lee’s penis is anthropomorphized and begins talking to him, gesticulating with all the verve that the shaft of a penis can muster, that Hulu’s new limited series Pam & Tommy elevates to high art.