Pamela Anderson

Well, nobody could accuse the Golden Globes Foundation — as they are now called — of predictability. Of the films that have been nominated for the ceremony on January 5, the frontrunner is Jacques Audiard’s much-discussed crime musical Emilia Pérez with ten nominations, including Best Film (Musical or Comedy), Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for its stars Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana. The movie, which has met with enormous controversy in some circles because of its unfettered approach to social mores — not least having a trans woman, Karla Sofía Gascón, in the lead — is undeniably a bold and distinctive film that indicates that this is a year of risk-taking rather than complacency. But to what end?

The recent Golden Globe awards saw the Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy, a fictionalized account of the theft of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s notorious sex tape, lose out to The White Lotus. It wasn’t much of a surprise. Whether or not you thought the second series of The White Lotus was a worthy successor to the first, it was still much-discussed water-cooler television in a way that Pam & Tommy simply wasn’t. Yet perhaps there was another consideration at play. 2023 marks the grand return of Pamela Anderson — if, of course, she ever went away. She refused to cooperate with the production of the miniseries, and it’s now clear she didn’t want it to interfere with her own ambitions.

The new and thoroughly adult-oriented miniseries Pam & Tommy tells the tale of the relationship between the musician Tommy Lee and the actress Pamela Anderson. It is interspersed with the narrative of the notorious theft and subsequent internet leak of their Nineties sex tape that has occupied a near-iconic place in popular culture ever since it occurred twenty-five years ago. Pam & Tommy was initially announced as a James Franco project in 2018, for him to both direct and star as Lee, but Franco’s current status as persona non grata saw him replaced by Sebastian Stan.