Pam & TomY, the first original series for the most adult audience Disney +, is about to reach the platform. And it is not a coincidence that it is to narrate one of the great media scandals of the nineties. The platform will show a whole new generation the weight and importance of a media event with unforeseeable consequences. The three part series Pam&Tommy, starring Sebastian Stan and Lily James, will remember one of his most sordid moments on television. Also its importance in the way we understand the internet today.
In 1995, television reigned as the great broadcasting medium par excellence. Internet was still territory between trial and error, in addition to being available to a select group of users. Just in that brief gap, in which the celebrity began in scandals persecuted by paparazzi and tabloid media, one of the great events of pop culture occurred. One that forever changed the relationships between celebrities, the online world, copyright and privacy. Without knowing it, the couple formed by Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee took a definitive step to change the history of virtuality. Which is precisely one of the objectives of Disney + with its new series Pam & Tommy.
They did it through an accident that they lost control of almost immediately. When electrician Rand Gauthier stole Lee’s safe, he didn’t just set off a seedy buy-and-sell mechanism. He also showed that the newly discovered limits of the internet were still very fuzzy and complicated to be fully understood. The copyright on the image and the material in question was put to the test as the internet exploded with the scandal. Gauthier, without any US law to prevent it, sold the couple’s sensitive material and profited from doing so.
As if that were not enough, it opened the door to the possibility of similar events in the following decades. But especially, it was the reaction of the world around the video that made it clear that a new era had arrived. It was a shock to what was even understood as privacy and intimacy and the ability to protect sensitive material. Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee starred in a sordid circumstance that made clear the power and dangers of the internet.
Now, Disney+ takes the risk of telling the story of Pam & Tommy for a generation educated by the internet and the multiscreen. This is one of the platform’s most ambitious projects, which also analyzes the way in which we relate to the online space. The first big internet scandal — and intellectual property and image rights too — is a novel approach to a complex issue. Disney + tries to relate a circumstance that opens the possibility of debate to reach a more adult audience.
Pam & Tommy: the first series for adults on Disney +
By the time Anderson and Lee’s video became the best-selling pornographic material in history, it changed the internet. Until then, various situations had occurred. The most remembered was the leak of a sex video of the star Rob Lowe, in 1989. In the footage, the actor could be seen with two young women (later it would be known that one of them was a minor) in sexual situations. The scandal devastated the actor’s career and was also about to take him to jail.
However, it was still a version of the scandal that was in the hands of the legal field and that did not become part of pop culture. Something that did happen with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, the same story that will tell Pam & Tommy. The couple, who married in ’95, just ninety hours after meeting, became a symbol of scandalous celebrity. His usual fights, disputes, even complaints, disagreements and reconciliations created the ideal ground for immediate fame. Disney + has decided not only to tell the story of the couple, but also the repercussion of that rupture of the idea of frivolous recognition.
This is a risky move that, one way or another, contextualizes events such as the sexual videos of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. In fact, this first adult series will be focused on the idea of building a version of a fact of which there are many versions. Especially once Anderson and Lee ended up divorcing. The separation made the legal debate about possession and the right to the image even more complicated to prove.
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Of course, there’s also the fact that Disney+ will show on Pam & Tommy a story whose main component is a sexual video. One that changed the way in which the possession and distribution of private material is perceived, in addition to the notion of fame.