Pam And Tommy Get An Offer They Should Have Refused In The Series Finale Promo
I can't look.
From the initial three episodes, Pam & Tommy presented itself as a ‘90s era recreation of Hollywood culture, centered around a tabloid event. But as the series has gone on, the true horror story it’s telling has become obvious. Even though fans know the outcome — Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee divorced, and Anderson refused to have anything to do with the series telling the story 25 years later — the Pam & Tommy Episode 8 promo revelation that this story is a tragedy still feels fresh.
Warning: Spoilers for Pam & Tommy Episode 7 follow. After the grotesque sequence of Anderson’s deposition in Episode 6, one might think Episode 7 would have been better. But instead, it focused on a different kind of humiliation: the one in the public sphere. Pam may have been emotionally traumatized by lawyers, but at least that was in a private room. Getting roasted on national television, and being forced to laugh along with her own mortification for fear of offending her fans, was an entirely new low, one that broke Pam to the point of doing whatever it would take to make this all go away.
Next up, the finale promo brings in a man who seems to be offering a solution that will do just that. Unfortunately, as the audience knows, it will do anything but.
The series finale is titled “Seattle.” The synopsis focuses on the man making that offer: “A cocky young Internet entrepreneur enters the picture, changing everything.”
There are several ways celebrities deal with scandal, but one of the most tried and true methods is to wait it out, because eventually, it will go away. It’s a variation on “if you’re going through hell, keep going,” with the belief one will ultimately come out the other side.
That’s the deal the real Pam and Tommy tried to make in 1997, the brazen-it-out approach. They agreed to get paid to let the tape be broadcast online once, assuming the hype would blow over after that.
But the problem, as it has been through the entire series, was that Anderson and Lee simply did not understand the internet. They were computer illiterate from the beginning, and the people they surrounded themselves with weren’t any better. They assumed broadcasting the video on the world wide web once would be equivalent to airing the footage on a 1990s premium cable channel at 3 a.m. Only the hardcore would stay up, watch, pay, and record it, and the rest of the world would never hear about it again.
Too bad the internet is forever. It’s a mistake that they still have to live with to this day.
Pam & Tommy’s final episode streams on Hulu on Wednesday, March 9, 2022.
