What I’m Watching: Pam and Tommy (Series Finale)

Pam and Tommy: Season 1, Episode 8 “Seattle” (B)

This was a relatively satisfactory ending, but I can’t help feeling like this show petered out a bit after a strong and furiously interesting opening. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for Tommy since being demoted to a pre-show from opening or closing it is hardly the same as what happened to Pamela’s career, and he couldn’t even understand that his penis being admired by people who had seen the tape meant that they revered him while making fun of Pamela. I did note when she mentioned losing the role in “L.A. Confidential” to Kim Basinger that Basinger would go on to win an Oscar for the part, something that likely wouldn’t have happened with Pamela but easily could have sent her career in a much more serious direction. Seth played a big role in the way things went here, trying to buy the rights to something that was already out there so that he could distribute it exclusively, and Pamela just wanted to be done with it and definitely not to make any money off of it. Rand’s newfound spirituality came far too late, and it seemed strange that he got a happy ending of sorts, permitted two coffee catch-ups a year with Erica and allowed to live a new life where people don’t even believe that he’s the one who stole the tape after he tells them it was him. It’s hard to know what to make of Pam and Tommy’s relationship given their multiple reconciliations, but I did find this show – and its performances – well worth watching.

Series grade: B+
Series MVPs: Lily James as Pam and Sebastian Stan as Tommy

What I’m Watching: Pam and Tommy (Penultimate Episode)

Pam and Tommy: Season 1, Episode 7 “Destroyer of Worlds” (B)

We’re hurtling towards the end of this show here, and I’m not sure how satisfying it’s all going to be. But it did feel right to bring Rand back into it, once again going it alone with Miltie refusing to take his calls. Seeing the anger that he feels because all those around him are profiting while he still has no glory and remains fearful for his life didn’t paint him as all that sympathetic, mainly because of the reason that he’s in this mess. Sure, Tommy showing up with the $27,000 and then burning it to make a point that it didn’t matter to him at all while it meant everything to him was cruel, but Erica’s reaction when she finally found out what he had done said it all. His dismissal of consent forms makes it hard to pity him, and unfortunately the poor man played by Brian Huskey had to bear the brunt of his fury, channeled through Andrew Dice Clay’s Butchie, who wants his money but also wants heads to roll. It was good to see Pam do very well opposite Jay Leno on his show and then tell Tommy that she was calling the shots while he had to “exist only for her,” but I don’t think that mentality’s going to last very well. He already tried to dictate how her big premiere night went, and her hearing someone says that it was the second best movie she was in this year was particularly crushing. I’m not sure what to expect from the finale, and I’ll be curious to see how and if it incorporates the several decades since the events of this show.

What I’m Watching: Pam and Tommy

Pam and Tommy: Season 1, Episode 6 “Pamela in Wonderland” (B)

This is the second consecutive episode that ran just over thirty minutes, a stark difference from the earlier installments that were much closer to an hour. While I recognize that this is a tendency of streaming series to be inconsistent in length depending on the available and relevant content of a particular episode, it does feel jarring, especially considering that not much happened in this episode. It was largely Tommy-free, focused instead on Pamela’s own journey, one that involved a very positive relationship with Playboy and Hugh Hefner that didn’t feel like it was taking advantage of her in the way that she had expected or that the lawyer questioning her thought it would. John Billingsley, an actor I originally saw on “Enterprise” who has been in plenty since then, was a perfect choice to play the condescending lawyer whose main goal was to prove that Pamela regularly got paid for showing her naked body, and that the tape shouldn’t be any different. It was good to see that Pamela seemingly ditched her boyfriend who didn’t want her to model for Playboy and that she went for her first shoot with her mom, but now she’s dealing with all of this without any support. Paul Ben-Victor’s lawyer put up a decent fight against the onslaught of questions, but she’s not happy with that, and we have two episodes to see how this case resolves and whether the man actually responsible for this mess – one very disgruntled carpenter – will be held accountable for stealing the tape in the first place.

What I’m Watching: Pam and Tommy

Pam and Tommy: Season 1, Episode 5 “Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth” (B+)

All of these web searches are quite entertaining, remember things like AltaVista and the slowness with which graphics would load on each page. Unfortunately for Pamela, the tape was all too easy to find, and she also had no control over the bitter lawsuit that ended up getting printed in the New York Times. The idea that the sex tape itself wasn’t a story but that it was stolen and that part of a major legal dispute would make it newsworthy says a lot about how the media works, and that’s even truer now that things can be “reported” online without any sourcing and then become stories because of the way people respond to them rather than any evidence. Jay Leno’s initial lack of interest and then his piling on hit Pamela very hard, and the fact that she’s the only one being deposed highlights just how much more it’s going to affect her than it will Tommy. As usual, the musician has no control whatsoever over his temper, beating up the people who were excited to recognize him and then throwing a fit when Third Eye Blind got the better space from the same management company. Rand seems to have gotten ahead of Pellicano, completely cleaning out his apartment and disappearing so that his latest visit wouldn’t result in deadly violence, though I have a hard time imagining that he would be able to pull that off unless he’s something gotten things under control since his last desperate and frantic appearance.

What I’m Watching: Pam and Tommy

Pam and Tommy: Season 1, Episode 4 “The Master Beta” (B+)

Seeing the website load so slowly on dial-up was a real blast from the past, a reminder of the era that this show is doing a great job of portraying. It took Tommy long enough to even realize that his safe was gone, and unfortunately that gave Rand plenty of time to work on distribution so that it was far too late to do anything to stop it. After Pamela expressed shock that Tommy hadn’t paid Rand and that she had refused to give him his tool box back, Don Harvey’s enforcer wasted absolutely no time in heading straight to Rand’s and demanding that he tell him where the tape was. While that wasn’t successful, it did send Rand back into a miserable tailspin, which wasn’t helped by Miltie’s unwillingness to be accountable in any way and the guy selling bootleg tapes for less money in the Tower Records parking lot. Tommy telling Pamela that it wasn’t like anyone was seeing anything they hadn’t seen before was a poor choice, and after she lost the baby, she went ballistic on the paparazzo who dared to try to photograph her in the car. Having to see the tape on set when everyone else was watching it was humiliating, and Pamela is sadly correct that, much as Tommy can’t possibly understand it, it’s much worse for her and a devastating development for her career. Things aren’t looking good for anyone at the moment, and it’s shocking that Rand is still alive and not being constantly beaten up.

Take Three: Pam and Tommy

Pam and Tommy: Season 1, Episode 3 “Jane Fonda” (B+)

After the deep dive into Pam and Tommy first getting together, we’re back at the point where we stopped at the end of episode one. I like that this show is now tracing both the efforts of Rand and Miltie to distribute the tape and Pam’s career development. I do wonder whether anyone other than Seth Rogen could have played Rand or if he’s shaping the character based on his comedic persona, but I enjoy the confidence with which he says “compentory damages” and finding out about his relationship with Erica was very enlightening. I like Taylor Schilling and have appreciated the roles she’s taken on following the gradual de-prioritization of her role on “Orange is the New Black.” The lengths he went to in order to find the plumbing tool she needed so that he could “propose” to her were impressive, and it of course helped him with the best idea of all: distributing the sex tape on the Internet. Miltie’s lack of comprehension of how the World Wide Web worked was the least of their problems, and he was quite ambitious in his funding aims, including enlisting a mob contact who might be able to fund them. It’s difficult to watch as Tommy’s horrific treatment of his contractors is going to affect Pam, since she’s been fighting so hard to get taken seriously at work and is also entering a happy phase of her life with a baby on the way. The rate of duplication of those tapes means this is about to blow up, and she has absolutely no idea it’s coming.

Round Two: Pam and Tommy

Pam and Tommy: Season 1, Episode 2 “I Love You, Tommy” (B+)

Because I don’t know all that much about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, I’d rather watch this show play out and then go ahead to figure out what was actually true and what’s merely conjecture or pure invention. Its exaggerated nature became abundantly clear in this episode when, after the happy couple showed their private parts to each other, Tommy got up in the morning to have a conversation with his moving penis, telling it that he was in love. That was an absurd scene, one indicative of the excess of these characters and their extremely impulsive decisions. Pamela’s declaration that she wanted someone boring shouldn’t have been followed up by sending shots around to the whole club, since Tommy would never have seen her and then come over to lick her face, something she opted to pass on. Tracking her down to Cancun and then calling every hotel to find her was a bold and truly stalker-ish move, and seeing his “boys” told to leave the bar because they didn’t meet the dress code demonstrated how little he cares for authority or rules. The flight home revealed that they didn’t actually know much about each other, but after a rough start with the movie preferences, they bonded over French fries. Not having a clue whose house they were going to live in – or even where the other lived – was a red flag, but they settled on Malibu quickly, bringing us up to speed with meeting Rand and Lonnie and that unfortunate video camera. Now that at least we know both our protagonists, it’s time to get back to that video going public.

Pilot Review: Pam and Tommy

Check out my one-minute take on every new pilot, which is embedded below and you can also watch by subscribing to movieswithabe on YouTube.