Pam & Tommy Premiere Recap: Complex Characters Add Humanity to Sex Tape Saga -- So Why a Talking Penis?

The first hour focuses on Seth Rogen's Rand Gauthier, the carpenter contracted to help renovate Tommy Lee's (Sebastian Stan) bedroom suite in the immediate aftermath of his whirlwind four-day romance and wedding to Pamela Anderson (Lily James).

It's hard to say how much of this story is true, but we learn in this hour that at least this version of Tommy Lee is a grade-A jackass. Not only does he treat Rand and Lonnie, one of his partners on the project, like garbage, but he ultimately fires them for daring demand that he actually pay them something for services rendered.

There were ways to try and make Tommy look a little sympathetic in this story, but they didn't bother at all in the first hour. He was almost cartoonishly dickish (pun intended), suddenly declaring their work shoddy when they said they needed him to reimburse them some of the $25k-plus they already owed him, and then abruptly firing them.

When Rand came back to pick up his tools, Tommy pulled a gun on him and declared he couldn't have those back, either. So at this point, Tommy is threatening people and has definitely stolen both work and physical assets from them.

All of this was to set up Rand's motive for everything that's to come later. And it seemed very important in this hour that his entire motive be revenge and rage directed at Tommy Lee and solely Tommy Lee.

That's an important distinction, because that opening hour informs everything that's to come later with Tommy in this series. Even when we see him being sweet and supportive to Pamela, or encouraging her to stand up for herself in her career, we need to remember that this is how he treated people working for him when he owed them money.

We're not saying that producers are trying to justify what happened later, or that it makes Tommy somehow less of a victim in regards to the sex tape. It just further establishes Pamela as the bigger victim because she actually seems to be a good person throughout this so far, and it's established right away that Tommy's not.

As goofy as this show can be at times -- and there's a whole discussion between Tommy and his penis that we see in the second hour -- proper credit has to be given for the complexity of its characters, and the nuanced portrayals given by the leads in this series.

In particular, Stan and James are absolutely transformed into their respective characters, with incredible makeup helping to create the illusion, but most of it coming through the performances they deliver. Whether romping around with prosthetic genitals and breasts having sex on everything, or learning about one another with innocent little questions, or even singing along to "The King and I," they live and breathe these true-life personalities in a way that feels authentic.

It's important to pull them down from the pedestal the sex tape put them on and humanize them before the tape is unleashed and destroys their world, as we can then have a better feel for the impact its about to have on their lives.

After the first hour, it almost felt like a show about Rand with Pam and Tommy as only secondary characters. And that actually looked like a pretty compelling story, which is a huge credit to Rogen's work in his latest sad sack role. A little slow at times, we nevertheless felt all of his frustration.

But the second hour shifted gears entirely and treated us to a whole other show, finally putting the titular duo in the spotlight. What follows is the truncated version of their genuinely truncated whirlwind four-day romance.

According to this version of events, the pair met at a club when Pamela bought a round of drinks for the house and he introduced himself to her. Tommy then stalked her to Cancun where she was going on a "Baywatch" business trip to meet affiliate owners and station managers.

Once again, very little effort was made to make Tommy sympathetic in this hour, as he was aggressive, rude, arrogant and definitely creepy. The dude stalked her to another country. At the same time, she was absolutely into it, despite having just sworn off bad boys after her string of bad relationships.

What we saw here was a girl who clearly falls for the wrong guys doing it all over again. But what we learn as the series progresses is that she appears to have been drawn to his bravado and his ultimate confidence.

For all that Pamela Anderson was already a sex symbol, she was also very insecure and determined to be respected as an actress like the ones she admires most (Jane Fonda above all). Anyone who was anyone at the time knows no one was taking her seriously as anything more than the blonde bombshell in a bathing suit on TV.

Everything Tommy did was so brash and devil-may-care, she couldn't help but be drawn to his fearlessness. It was something she wished she had more of. So the appeal makes some kind of sense, but also there were so many behavior red flags that she completely ignored.

We got a sense of just how fast it was when the two started asking questions after they were married, like where the other lived and what Tommy's last name was. It was such fundamental stuff, but they had no idea. Nevertheless, there was still a sweetness emerging in their relationship.

All of that was to bring us full circle back to the incident with Rand, which culminated in him breaking into Tommy's house by himself and stealing an entire safe. Inside of it was money and guns and other stuff he hawked ... and a certain tape.

Now, we get the parallel structure of what will likely carry us through for a while, as well as the bubbling calm before all hell is about to break loose. Honestly, by the end of this third hour as we were on the verge of the sex tape getting out there, we found ourselves breathless with nerves and anticipation.

It was in this hour that we started to see that growing love and support between these newlyweds in a way that actually looked healthy and happy. Who knows, had their lives not gotten turned upside down, maybe they'd have been exactly what the other needed.

Tommy was coming off the highs of being in one of the planet's biggest rock bands of the '80s and needing to learn how to mellow out and be a decent human being. Pamela's star was on the rise and she was needing to prepare to take her career to whatever heights she could achieve.

Instead, they achieved infamy in all the wrong ways, with Tommy glorified for what was between his legs and for scoring with America's sex fantasy, and Pamela nearly destroyed and painfully slut-shamed for doing the exact same thing he did.

They were victims of the exact same thing. They both had their most intimate lives exposed to the public. But their story was not at all the same.

But that is for a future installment. This week was about laying the foundation for the hell that is to befall them. We've set them up for the fall by putting them both in such a good place in their relationship and even her career before it all falls apart around them.

At the same time, we've gained some sympathy for Rand, even as he's about to do something so heinous and invasive and wrong that it literally turns the world upside down and in some ways changes the face of the internet forever.

Nick Offerman is delightfully dirty as his porn star director friend who goes into business with him once they decide that the nascent internet is the way to distribute this sex tape anonymously to the masses.

And, because the goal here is to humanize everyone in this story for better or worse, we also meet Rand's wife Erica (Taylor Schilling), a porn star who dreams of also being taken more seriously as an actress (she is how many perceived Pamela Anderson as being one step away from after she appeared in Playboy).

Erica doesn't yet know anything about what Rand is up to, but she knows he's a bit of a loser who suddenly has some confidence. That part she likes, it's just a shame that it's in exploiting others for financial gain and getting revenge that he finally started to feel like a confident man. That should quickly change as this story spirals out of control.

What's compelling is that we're now heading into the part of the story that everyone thinks they know. But they only know the release of the tape and the subsequent public and media reaction to it. What will be compelling is stepping inside Pam and Tommy's world, and even Rand's world, as this thing blows up beyond anyone's wildest imaginations (or nightmares).

For the most part, this is some pretty serious and damaging subject matter, even if it was the fodder for late-night television for way too long. We even got an opening scene with a clearly uncomfortable Anderson getting roasted by Jay Leno over the sex tape, as if she'd been reduced to just that -- well, she had.

That's why it was so jarring when suddenly Tommy was having a genuine conversation with his penis, and it was moving and talking back. We could get over the prosthetic penis, and even the prosthetic breasts on Lily James because there was an authenticity in those being what they were.

This scene, though, where Tommy professed his love for Pamela to his member and his member argued back that he just got divorced and he should still be sowing his oats out there like a kid, just doesn't tonally fit with even the lighter scenes we've already gotten.

There's a somber and sinister build that was happening in these opening hours and this one scene completely threw us off kilter. We get that he was on ecstasy at the time, so we can perhaps forgive it because of that, but it was still an unnecessary distraction. If the point of this is for us to recontextualize how Anderson was treated, we don't need a talking penis along the way for a non-sequitur scene that is completely superfluous to the plot.

And if there's nothing else like it in the remaining five installments, then it will stand out even more for being such a mismatch. If there are more nonsense moments to come, those will only further hurt the message of the story that these kinds of attacks be taken seriously. What happened to Pam and Tommy became a joke, but it wasn't a joke and it still isn't a joke.

But a talking penis is. So are we to learn to try and take this story seriously and see them as the victims they were, or are we still laughing about it all these years later?