Pam & Tommy

“It’s not just a fuck tape. That’s them. They’re in love… You stole their intimacy. You took something private, something they never agreed to share… This isn’t just porn. It’s their life.”YES. On one hand, Pam & Tommy clearly comes from a place of good intentions. It does a really great job of highlighting the violation and trauma Pamela experienced, something that was cruelly ignored by the public back in the ’90s. It also sends an important message about consent, exploitation and the way society treats women, especially those in the spotlight. On the other hand, isn’t the show kind of repeating the same violation? In the ’90s, people entertained themselves by watching stolen footage without Pamela’s consent. Now, years later, they are being entertained again, this time by a dramatized story about how wrong that was. Yet it was still made without her approval. It feels almost ironic. A series that tries to criticize voyeurism while being built on it at the same time. Still, maybe it was better for someone to at least attempt to show things from her perspective, even if she wasn’t involved in the process. I believe that it helped some people realize the scale of the violation and the human being behind the headlines. But that understanding came at the cost of reopening a wound for someone who never asked for that. Even watching a reenactment of something so personal and painful felt deeply uncomfortable and invasive. So how do you rate a show that is both genuinely well crafted and so wrong at the same time?