Emmy spotlight: ‘Pam & Tommy’ stars Lily James, Sebastian Stan and Seth Rogen will crash this year’s Emmys
Look out for limited series “Pam & Tommy” to crash the Emmys this year. The fictionalized account of how the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape became an unexpected internet sensation was a revelation when it premiered on Hulu earlier this year, earning favorable reviews and lots of awards buzz.
Based on the 2014 Rolling Stone article “Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape” by Amanda Chicago Lewis, The eight-episode series follows the turbulent marriage of actress and nineties sex symbol Anderson (Lily James) and the notorious Mötley Crüe drummer Lee (Sebastian Stan). The series chronicles the events that unfolded after their honeymoon sex tape was stolen and later launched on the internet for millions to see.
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Seth Rogen plays Rand Gauthier, a former porn star-turned-construction worker who is hired to make renovations in the newlyweds’ mansion. After an altercation with Lee, Gauthier seeks revenge by stealing a safe from the garage that happens to contain the salacious tape. He takes the tape to his friend and former porn director boss (Nick Offerman), and after discovering the tape’s sexually explicit material, they hatch a plan to mass-produce and sell it online on the nascent world wide web. The comedy/drama is chock-full of riotous stranger-than-fiction sequences, copious nudity and sex scenes, and a propulsive energy spearheaded by showrunner Robert Siegel (“The Wrestler”).
Funnily enough, with all the awards talk for “Pam & Tommy,” Anderson and Lee don’t come to mind when one thinks about awards-caliber material. Even though Anderson was a superstar sex symbol, especially in the nineties, the model turned actress was never nominated for a major award, with the Emmys unsurprisingly ignoring her star-turn as C.J. Parker on the hit primetime soap “Baywatch.” While her bad boy former husband Lee did score a hat trick of Grammy nominations (for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1990, 1991 and 2009), he has hasn’t otherwise been a regular on the awards circuit, not even at the Emmys for his short-lived 2004 NBC reality show “Tommy Lee Goes to College.”
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We still have a couple of months until the end of the Emmys’ eligibility window, and the Best Limited Series/TV Movie categories are already stacked with top-notch contenders jostling for attention, like “Dopesick,” “The White Lotus,” “Maid,” “The Dropout,” “Station Eleven,” “The First Lady,” “Under the Banner of Heaven,” “The Staircase,” “Impeachment,” “Midnight Mass” and “Scenes From a Marriage.” So that begs the question. Can a series about the infamous celebrity couple break through at the Emmys this year, despite the TV academy’s penchant for prestige television that isn’t about a smutty sex tape?
The answer is yes, if favorable reviews from critics mean anything. The series has an impressive 79% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes (based on 104 critics’ reviews) and a 70 score at Metacritic, indicating a seal of approval from TV critics nationwide. Directing most of their attention to the series’ two leads, Lucy Mangan (Guardian) says that the series is a “warm, funny, intelligent and rather moving drama, with astonishing performances from Lily James as Anderson and Sebastian Stan as Lee,” while Carly Lane (Collider) raves that “while their performances could have very easily veered into caricature, there’s enough complexity in both actors’ portrayals to not just anchor the miniseries but the relationship we need to believe in for this narrative to hit hardest.”
Because of the white-hot competition in the limited series categories, “Pam & Tommy” is hovering in 15th place in our early combined odds in Best Limited Series. But the series is more likely to score nominations in the acting categories, with James sitting pretty in seventh place for her uncanny portrayal of the blonde bombshell, Stan in sixth place for his transformative performance as the past-his-prime rocker, and Rogen in an impressive third place for his nuanced supporting performance as the hapless Gauthier.
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