Tag: Phat Tuesdays

Pam & Tommy (Feb. 2, Disney Plus)

It seems to me that “Pam & Tommy” wants to have it both ways.

On one hand, it makes the point that the theft and subsequent distribution of a sex tape featuring actor Pamela Anderson and her husband, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, was a devastating invasion of privacy. On the other, it puts that humiliation on display by detailing how that sex tape spread around the world, with a large and often sympathetic focus on the man who stole it in the first place, contractor Rand Gauthier.

In fact, if you watched only the first of the eight episodes, you’d think the series should be named “Pam & Tommy & Rand.”

In the opener, Pam (Lily James) is barely glimpsed — and heard, having loud sex with Lee (Sebastian Stan) above the heads of Rand (Seth Rogen) and other workers who are building a “love pad” for the couple.

Luckily for us, Pam’s presence increases, because James’ performance is the best reason to watch this series. The physical transformation of the “Downton Abbey” and “Cinderella” star is uncanny, but her ability goes beyond mere mimicry. She gives an affecting portrayal of a character who, as the series progresses, grows from sex object and party girl to a woman fighting a lopsided and losing battle against misogyny.

Stan (“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”) also acquits himself well as the volatile Lee, although he comes off initially as a caricature, a thong-wearing, sports car-driving rock star who won’t pay Rand and his colleague for work they’re already done despite his aggressive boasts about his fortune. When schlubby, mulleted and broke Rand presses Tommy for the money, Lee fires them both.

To add insult to injury, Tommy puts a shotgun in Rand’s face when he comes back to retrieve his forgotten tool chest. All of this is clearly meant to give Rand proper motivation for later breaking in and stealing a safe from the couple’s garage.

I would presume the guns, watches, jewelry and cash inside that safe would have covered what Rand was owed, but he got greedy. The series portrays how Rand partners with porn producer Uncle Miltie (Nick Offerman) to shop the tape around to video companies. When none of them will touch it because Pam and Tommy haven’t signed releases, Rand and Miltie opt to sell it direct to consumers themselves using a website and mob money.

Tommy tries unsuccessfully to retrieve the tape, using fixer Anthony Pellicano (Don Harvey) and biker friends; then the couple tries and fails to keep Penthouse from printing images from it, compete with a humiliating and sexist deposition of Pam as part of the court case. A web porn entrepreneur named Seth Warshavsky (Fred Hechinger of “The White Lotus”) eventually makes the tape available free online to boost his web-cam business.

The show is an overstuffed combination of biopic, crime caper, and a treatise on the early days of the internet, the online porn industry and celebrity exploitation.

The biographic part mostly focuses on Pam’s and Tommy’s relationship, portraying it as a grand if unconventional love story after they meet at a club on New Year’s Eve 1994 and quickly marry in Mexico (I’ve read the courtship lasted six weeks; the series compresses that timeline to days). In real life, the marriage ended in 1998 after a physical fight (Lee pleaded no contest to felony spousal battery), but the show makes it easy to believe there was genuine love between the couple.

It also touches on how Pam got her start as a Playboy model; her unhappiness with her T&A role on “Baywatch”; her bid to be taken seriously as an actress; and Tommy’s frustration as Motley Crue is eclipsed by grunge and other new music.

(Don’t ask me what category the talking penis fits into — that’s right, Tommy has an argument with his dick about whether to commit to Pam. Giving his member its own cameo is an interesting choice considering the double standard of Pam being denigrated after the video came out while Tommy was congratulated for the size of his penis.)

It’s a no-brainer that Pam was the most negatively affected by the release of the tape, which was less a sex tape than a record of the couple’s honeymoon that included sex. The series shows her having a miscarriage amid the stress of learning that copies of the tape are being sold, and there’s no doubt the scandal had a negative impact on her career as well as her marriage.

In one scene, Pam tells Tommy and their lawyer that the court ruling in favour of Penthouse isn’t really about First Amendment rights to free speech but the fact that she, as someone who has spent her public life in a bathing suit and posing for Playboy, doesn’t have any rights.

“They can’t actually say that sluts — and that’s what this ruling is saying I am in case you’re unclear — they can’t actually say that sluts don’t get to decide what happens to pictures of their bodies,” she says.

It’s one of the more cogent scenes, the other being porn actor Erica (Taylor Schilling) upbraiding her ex Rand for treating Pam’s and Tommy’s private video as porn.

The slut-shaming of women like Pamela Anderson hasn’t gone away in the 25-plus years since the scandal erupted, but do we really need this miniseries to get that point across?

I’ve read that the real Pam Anderson doesn’t plan to watch the show. I hope she achieved some peace of mind in the years since her privacy was crassly violated, but bringing it up again in an eight-part series is unlikely to help with that.

Disney Plus, with National Geographic, also has the documentary “Torn” (Feb. 4), which explores not only the life and death of legendary mountain climber Alex Lowe, but what happens when his body is found 17 years later. The discovery unearths difficult emotions for Alex’s three sons, including filmmaker Max Lowe, his widow Jennifer and his surviving climbing partner Conrad Anker, who married Jennifer and raised Alex’s boys as his own.

Short Takes

Hope Street (Jan. 31, BritBox)

This new crime drama is about Leila Hussain, a detective constable parachuted in from Nottingham, England, to the small Northern Irish town of Port Devine. Despite the cosy, picturesque setting, it’s not twee and twinkly-eyed locals. Leila (Amara Karan, “The Night Of”) clashes with some of the townspeople and her colleague Sgt. Marlene Pettigrew (Kerri Quinn), not because she’s the town’s first Muslim officer, but because her aggressive style of investigation rubs people the wrong way, but she grows on them and they on her. Leila also has a secret — and dangerous — reason for being in Port Devine, known to her new boss (and potential love interest) Inspector Finn O’Hare (Ciaran McMenamin). With its focus on crimes other than homicides (at least in the three episodes I screened) and its assortment of characters, it’s an entertaining way to pass some time.

Suspicion (Feb. 4, Apple TV Plus)

Who kidnapped Leo Newman? To be honest, three episodes into this purported thriller, I wasn’t sure I cared given how long it was taking to tease out the threads of the plot. The son of a high-powered communications executive about to be named U.S. ambassador to the U.K. (Uma Thurman in a blink and you’ll miss her role), Leo is abducted in a high-end New York hotel by suspects wearing masks of the British royal family. In England, four seemingly unrelated people — an Oxford lecturer (Elizabeth Henstridge) and student (Tom Rhys Harries), a wannabe security expert (Kunal Nayyar) and a tax accountant (Georgina Campbell) — are arrested because they all happened to be at the hotel the night Leo was taken. So was violent Irish criminal Sean Tilson (Elyes Gabel). The other protagonists are a British detective (Angel Coulby) and an FBI specialist (Noah Emmerich) grudgingly forced to work together to find Leo, whose abduction appears to be linked to something his mother’s company is doing. Some of the plot devices are silly — including the ease with which Sean eludes an airport full of police in Belfast and the ridiculously intrusive level of surveillance used on the suspects — and the dialogue laughable. Sample: Aadesh Chopra’s (Nayyar) brother-in-law after Aadesh grudgingly agrees to join the family business, “It’s not carpets we are selling here, it’s dreams.”

Phat Tuesdays: The Era of Hip Hop Comedy (Feb. 4, Prime Video)

This docuseries by Reginald Hudlin (“House Party,” “The Bernie Mac Show”) uses a who’s who of comedy talent to revisit a seminal time not just in the history of Black entertainment, but entertainment in general. As the series tells it, Black comedians — unable to get coveted slots at the Comedy Store — established their own thriving scene at the Comedy Act Theatre in South L.A. in the ’80s, launching the careers of many well known Black comics, including the late Robin Harris. After the so-called “Hollyhood” became a less desirable destination for white showbiz executives following the Rodney King riots, comedian Guy Torry decided to take the ‘hood to Hollywood. Given “crumbs,” in one comedian’s words — a Tuesday night slot in the Store’s smallest room — Torry, his fellow comedians and the celebrities who flocked to the club turned it into one of the hottest destinations on the Sunset Strip. When Phat Tuesday moved to the larger Main Room, it sold that out too and became a conduit to TV and movie deals for the comedians on its stage, essentially making Black comedy part of the Hollywood mainstream. If you’re a comedy fan, you’ll want to check this out.

Prime Video (formerly Amazon Prime Video) also has the new action series “Reacher” (Feb. 4), based on the “Jack Reacher” novels; and the rom-com “Book of Love” (Feb. 4), an opposites attract tale about an uptight English author (Sam Claflin) and the Mexican translator (Verónica Echegui) who turns his book into an erotic novel.

If You Missed It . . .

We Need to Talk About Cosby (Crave)

Do check out this docuseries by W. Kamau Bell, which I got too late to include in last week’s list. Based on what I’ve seen of it, it does a thorough, thoughtful job of comparing the Bill Cosby we thought we knew — revered comedian and TV star — with the one we know now, the man accused of serial sexual assault. It gives voice to some of Cosby’s victims as well as Black people for whom the change in perspective is a particularly painful one.

Odds and Ends

Would that I could tell you what I think of new Netflix comedy “Murderville” (Feb. 3) but — all together now! — reviews are embargoed until Tuesday. Toronto-born Will Arnett stars as detective Terry Seattle and the shtick is that in every episode a new celebrity guest becomes his partner and, without a script, has to figure out the identity of the murderer. Guests include Annie Murphy, Conan O’Brien, Ken Jeong, Kumail Nanjiani, Marshawn Lynch and Sharon Stone. Netflix also has Season 2 of “Sweet Magnolias” (Feb. 4) and Season 2 of “Raising Dion” (Feb. 1).

If you remember Lemon and Jimbo from Season 1 of “Canada’s Drag Race” — and how could you not? — you’ll want to watch them compete against “RuPaul’s Drag Race” stars from other countries in “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs the World” (Crave, Feb. 1, 9 p.m.). Crave also has Season 2 of “Raised by Wolves” (Feb. 3).

I would have loved to get a look at “Canfield Roots” on PBS (Feb. 1, 7:30 p.m.). It’s about the community of Canfield in Ontario and its connection to the Underground Railroad, which helped enslaved Black Americans escape to relative freedom, and its most famous conductor, Harriet Tubman. PBS also has “Arctic Sinkholes” on “Nova” (Feb. 2, 9 p.m.), which explores the phenomenon of methane gas explosions in the far North and, alas, yet another threat to the planet from climate change.

And if climate change docs make you want to put your fingers in your ears and go la, la, la, la, you can watch Season 3 of “Celebrity Big Brother” on Global TV (Feb. 2, 8 p.m.), although celebrity might be stretching it a bit.

Finally, Hollywood Suite has Season 5 of the acclaimed Italian crime drama “Gomorrah” on demand staring Feb. 1.

NOTE: The listings here are in Eastern Standard Time and I’ve verified the times where possible, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of programs reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste. The Odds and Ends section includes some shows that I have not watched.