'Pam and Tommy' Episode 6 Recap: “Pamela in Wonderland”

Pamela becomes a star.

Pam and Tommy, Hulu

Now that we are nearing the endpoint of the series, Pamela’s rise to fame comes to light.

I never knew much about Pam Anderson. I knew that she was a supermodel, she appeared in a terrible movie (more on that soon), and she was a victim of a stolen sex tape. OK, maybe ten-year-old me didn’t know that she was A) a victim or B) it was stolen, but I probably had some inkling that this tape existed. I found this episode fascinating because it shows how Pam got involved with Playboy and how she’s always had to fight men who wanted to control her image.

But it couldn’t focus solely on her rise to fame; it also had to showcase some of the most painful events of the entire series. Pam is grilled by the lawyers from Penthouse about her past and the content of the sex tape because they want to show images from the sex tape to the world.

Pam and Tommy, Hulu

Back to the Past.

In August of 1989, Pamela was attending a B.C. Lions football game in Vancouver. If you’ve ever attended a sporting event, there are times when the camera operators point the cameras into the crowd and let the audience appear on the big screen. They’re often either making silly faces, doing some kind of crazy dance, or kissing their significant other. In Pam’s case, she was wearing a Labatt’s Beer t-shirt and was featured on the big screen during a promo for the beer. Not soon afterward, a representative from Labatt came up to Pam and offered her a job as a model for the brand. Absolutely true story.

After that, the series stretches the truth a little bit. Pam becoming a spokesmodel for a beer label would lead to discovery from Playboy magazine. Real-life was a little more complicated; it was a combination of Labatt’s job and Pam taking on additional modeling contracts. Nevertheless, her boyfriend at the time vehemently disagrees with Pam modeling for the adult magazine, so she leaves him.

Pamela Anderson meets Playboy Mansion.

Attending the mansion with her mother in tow, Pam eventually works up the courage to appear in front of the camera. It’s reassuring to hear that the work she’s doing with Playboy, is far more classy than the work that shows up in rival magazines like Penthouse. Perhaps the biggest difference between how her body appears in the magazine and how it’s distributed via the sex tape is that she still has some measure of control of her body is seen.

It’s obvious that she’s doing good work for the magazine since she has a private meeting with Editor-in-Chief of Playboy Magazine, Hugh Hefner. This only bolsters Pam’s excitement for the job and her want of moving up in the modeling world. Looking around at the other women in the mansion makes her think of one thing that would assist her right away — breast implants.

While her rise to fame in the modeling world was something for her to cherish, everything in the present is something she would much rather forget. She continues to be questioned by Penthouse’s lawyers and she even has to sit through the sex tape and identify herself and Tommy in the footage. It’s tough to watch as an onlooker, can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to sit in that room and watch that intimate footage with other people.

There’s one more past event featured and that’s the evening that Pam and Tommy decide what to do with the sex tape they’ve made on their vacation. Pam looks fed up with the camera, but Tommy insists that they save the tape of their vacation in the safe downstairs. Even when it comes to her relationship with her husband, she’s lost control of her image.