‘Pam And Tommy’ Episode 3 Recap: “Jane Fonda”

After spending Pam & Tommy Episode 2 (“I Love You, Tommy”) on the genesis of our titular pair’s love story, Episode 3 (“Jane Fonda”) brings us back to the present (…of later 1995), as Rand and Uncle Miltie attempt to capitalize on Rand’s fortuitous find. The real-life Pamela Anderson has — through “a source” — expressed disappointment that Pam & Tommy exists at all, in that it dramatizes an extremely painful moment in her life; if she does choose to watch it, this episode would probably only deepen her anguish as it attempts to sell the audience on the parallels between Pam and Rand.

It takes virtually no time for Uncle Miltie to transition from shock at the video he’s watching to plotting how he and Rand might make money off it. But while Uncle Miltie does not lack for contacts in adult entertainment, a montage shows a succession of decreasingly respectable porn operators declining to distribute it: without signed releases from the tape’s stars, any production company would be exposing themselves (no pun intended) to a massive lawsuit from Pam and Tommy. So much for Rand’s (offensively appropriative quasi-indigenous) prayer that the tape “knock these fuckers down a peg” and “in the process deliver great financial reward to those they have wronged, like a shitload of money”!

Frustrated by all the rejection, Rand has just punched another hole in his apartment wall when he gets a call from an Erica, asking him to come over. A flashback to five years earlier shows us the first meeting between Erica (Taylor Schilling) and Rand, when he’s a handyman dispatched to her apartment; as they hang out, she reveals that she’s an adult film performer, leaving him “starstruck.” We will eventually learn that, in the present, the two are still married only because they can’t afford the expense of a divorce; Erica now shares the apartment with her girlfriend, which doesn’t seem to have dimmed Rand’s devotion.

Erica needs a new float cup valve, but her toilet is so old that no one makes that specific kind anymore; Rand is thrilled to take on the job of tracking one down for her. Calling hardware stores in a widening radius doesn’t yield results, but then he remembers the World Wide Web, and an AltaVista search brings him to a store in Ohio. Rand is about to read out his Discover card number to the clerk when he is struck by inspiration, and races over to Uncle Miltie. They don’t need a film company to distribute Pam and Tommy’s sex tape: they can sell it themselves, on the web (aka “this thing on the computer”). Uncle Miltie doesn’t entirely understand how making it available online could be, as Rand claims, “free” — not quite; definitely cheaper than buying ad space in a magazine — but when Rand says that all they’ll need to produce tapes is an “asshole with deep pockets,” Uncle Miltie says, “I know people like that”…

…and sets up a meeting with Butchie (Andrew Dice Clay); Uncle Miltie says he bankrolled Deep Throat. However, not even Butchie wants to touch this thing without releases. Then Rand pitches his online-sales concept, claiming they could be completely anonymous and untraceable: “There is no place for cops and lawyers to go to.” I feel fairly confident that, despite the know-it-all air he projects, Rand is about to learn how many gaps there actually are in his understanding of how the internet works — we will later see him filling out an InterNIC form (on paper, by hand) to register his domain name, for example — but since Butch and Uncle Miltie know even less about it than Rand does, Butch is convinced. He agrees to lend Uncle Miltie $50,000 on standard 30-day loan shark terms, and states that he will also be taking 15% of gross sales; Rand isn’t thrilled about going into business with a Mobster, but he accepts.

Pam also starts this episode with a New Age-y blessing: she and Tommy are asking the universe for a baby, but when she uncovers her pregnancy test, it’s negative. He wants to “try” again immediately, but she reminds him that she has a big monologue to shoot on Baywatch the next day — the first time in weeks that she’s had more than two lines in a row. She’s nervous but excited on the day, but when a PA delivers new pages, she is dismayed to see that her big monologue has been cut; now she’s just going to be running into the ocean and pulling out a bag of drugs, because the three middle-aged men at video village feel that will be “stronger.” She pretends to accept this in the moment and gets condescendingly praised as a “pro” for it, but mopes in her trailer; Melanie reminds her that this is going to be her last season on Baywatch, because her forthcoming film Barb Wire is going to make her a movie star.

Tommy hasn’t had a great day either — he stumbled upon a Behind The Music on Mötley Crüe, which noted how the rise of grunge has made hair metal irrelevant and Crüe’s recent self-titled album was a flop — but he’s channeled his frustration into making Pam a huge Greek feast to celebrate her. (In the course of this, we learn more of Tommy’s backstory: his mother is Greek; his Minnesotan father met her when he was in the military, stationed overseas; and Tommy’s government name is Thomas Lee Bass. All of this, including Tommy’s parents’ names, is apparently brand-new information to Pam that has never come up in the two months they’ve known each other and lived together? Okay!) Pam reluctantly admits to Tommy that her monologue got cut; heartbroken for her, he urges her to make them restore it and threaten to quit if she doesn’t. Pam doesn’t go that far, but she does cheerfully present an action plan for how they could shoot it without her would-be scene partner present, promising that she can nail it in two takes and that they’ll be glad to have it as an option later. She then walks off as though it is a fait accompli, so I guess we’re supposed to think they go for it…?

Back to Rand, who dresses up and brings flowers to Erica’s, kneeling before her with a ring box that turns out to contain the valve. Comedy! Born of heartbreak and unrequited love! He takes her for dinner to thank her for unintentionally setting him on a path to fulfill his potential, though he refuses to tell her how. Afterward, he flashes back to a time he visited Erica on the set of one of Uncle Miltie’s productions: the original co-star with whom she was supposed to do an anal scene has to leave for a bartending shift, and when Erica sees what his replacement’s packing, she refuses to accommodate it. Uncle Miltie says that guys with small penises aren’t easy to find, so Erica appeals to Rand, and before you know it, he’s a porn star too. The two of them are so sweet in the moment, in fact, that Uncle Miltie has to bark at them to tone it down: “Stop smiling, it’s a fucking dungeon!”

Then we see the star of another unexpectedly sweet sex tape meeting Gail (Mozhan Marnò), the publicist on Barb Wire, who wants to know what the narrative of Pam’s PR campaign will be. Pam’s not sure, so Gail asks whose life Pam aspires to emulate and learns that it’s Jane Fonda: she started as a girl next door, transitioned into sex bomb with Barbarella, then moved into serious activism, feminist politics, and workout tape entrepreneurship. (Said tape was also part of her activism, though that doesn’t come up in the episode.) Gail thinks this is a great narrative: “Freedom.”

Rand is also pursuing freedom, or so the episode hopes we feel: he takes a break from designing video box art and setting up the website to sign his divorce papers: Butchie’s money has freed him to move into the next phase of his life. When Uncle Miltie returns from his mission of putting cash in safe deposit boxes in Montreal and Amsterdam, Rand shows him the tape-duping operation he’s set up in the back of a dry cleaner’s. In Malibu, Pam takes another pregnancy test: this time it’s positive, so she’s looking forward to the next phase of her life too.

But the final shot of the episode takes us back to that bank of electronic equipment to remind us that while Pam’s life is about to change, it’s going to be for the worse.

VHS Rewinder

• As a fellow Canadian, I appreciated the Canadian mustard Lily James put on “about” when delivering Pam’s monologue to Tommy: she’s clearly been coached to know it’s more like “aboat” than the usual “aboot.”
• A sing-along in the Baywatch makeup trailer finds Pam and the assembled crew members joining in as The Cardigans’ “Lovefool” comes out of the radio. Alas, this is an even more anachronistic needle drop than “Praise You” in E01: “Lovefool” wasn’t released until the following year.
• Uncle Miltie and Rand meet Butchie at Barone’s, a real restaurant in Los Angeles that was founded in the mid-’40s and remains open today. (Uncle Miltie: “Barone’s. This is the last place I saw my kid.”) However, when Rand takes Erica for dinner, it’s at “Toni’s American Bistro”…but is clearly the real Barone’s location.

  I’m curious to know if the graphics team was the first to get a note that the name “Barone’s” wasn’t cleared and that the version that will be available on Hulu (I’m watching a critic’s advance screener) will call it Toni’s in dialogue.

• Speaking of Butchie: when he dismisses the idea of releasing a celebrity sex tape, he names some stars who’ve been implicated in such documentation: Sylvester Stallone, Marlon Brando — and Rob Lowe, who has tried to reframe the narrative around his in more recent years but who, given his currently squeaky-clean Republican image, may not love knowing it’s being used here as a punchline.
• In case it wasn’t clear enough to the viewer that no one behind the scenes at Baywatch takes Pam seriously as an artist, we get a fairly extensive look at how producers calibrated exactly how much of her ass they could get away with airing. Ooh, it’s so terrible how those Baywatch pigs exploited and objectified her! Look how the camera is trained directly on her butt!!! There are ways to have shot this that wouldn’t also exploit or objectify Lily James, but: oh well!
• Not to be Montage Cop but this episode also has four. Kind of indulgent imo!!!

Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.