Pam & Tommy 2022

I can't say enough good things about the performances from Lily James and Sebastian Stan here. James in particular is completely transformed into Pamela Anderson and the results are incredible. For a lot of the time I completely forgot I wasn't watching the real her. The recreation of the 1990s is also done with skill (God, I miss the '90s).

This miniseries tells the true story (undoubtedly with a lot of embellishments and creative license) of the theft and distribution of a private sex tape featuring two celebrities. It changes tone a lot throughout, flitting between a dark comedy, crime/legal drama, earnest romance and lurid sex adventure.

These different moods are held together surprisingly well. Each episode is treated as its own thing with its own style but there's still a cohesion to it all. A lot of focus is given to the effect the scandal had on Pamela and it's all the stronger for it, treating her respectfully and clearly showing the line between what she was happy to do publicly and what was an invasion of her privacy. The romance between her and Tommy Lee is incredibly sweet but also shows the reasons why they didn't work out.

The changes in tone also cause issues though, because the pacing of this is all over the place. Episodes will completely abandon storylines and characters to focus on something else and the fact is that some of those things just aren't as interesting. The best stuff is when Pam and Tommy are on screen, and there are long segments without them. Seth Rogen certainly does a decent job but his story stays one-note a little too long, and while I started out rooting for his character that all went away as the show went on.

Content-wise this definitely isn't for everyone, and even I was getting annoyed with the amount of swearing by the second or third episode. That's a sign of extremely lazy writing for me. Most of the sexual content is contained to the first few episodes and while it doesn't go as far as the marketing may have lead everyone to believe, a no-holds-barred sequence in which Sebastian Stan has a conversation with his own cock is certainly memorable.

A critic I followed gave this a 4/5. So I watched, however, the same critic gave Maid a 4/5 and remembered how watching that felt like homework, I knew the next time he praised a series I wasn't digging, I needed to drop it. So I stopped watching this after the fifth episode.

Perhaps it was that this was released weekly that I nearly made it through the whole thing, but it just wasn't that attractive of a story to keep me invested to stay for the whole thing. Performances are great, particularly Lily James but besides that, there's not much here in a limited series. Something like this should've been a two-hour comedy film and reminds me not every story deserves the TV treatment (I think Maid, Normal People and Sharp Objects reflect this, although they do have merit here and there, the story itself feels stretched for the sake of it). Pam and Tommy just aren't compelling characters who I feel for, Tommy's a jerk and Pam lacks much depth (she has the innocence of course, but there isn't much else for me to sympathize with). Seth Rogan and Nick Offerman's characters have some fun moments, but I don't see either as worth eight hours of story.

Not for me. If you liked it, cool, it's great when people enjoy things. I, however, am only on this planet for a limited time so I can't dedicate my brain to shows like this that lack any reason for existing.