‘Pam And Tommy’ Episode 5 Recap: “Uncle Jim And Aunt Susie In Duluth”

It’s unclear how much time has passed since the events of Pam & Tommy Episode 4 (“The Master Beta”), but Pam and Tommy both seem to have given up on recovering the tape, and are moving on, as much as they can: when we first see Pam, she’s getting interviewed about Barb Wire for Glamour, and sharing, “Bad stuff happens, you know? What’s the point of dwelling on it?” Afterward, she finds Tommy in the bedroom, and we’re reminded that there’s a lot of “bad stuff” they’re still dealing with — both the tape and the pregnancy loss. And, it seems, Tommy’s morbid fixation on his career, declining just as Pam’s is on the rise. While she attends an “Entertainment Weekly thingy,” Tommy goes from watching the video for Alanis Morrissette’s “You Oughta Know” to moping about the platinum and gold records hanging in a hallway: from sales in the mid seven-figures for Mötley Crüe’s ’80s albums, there’s a big dip to just 500,000 for the band’s latest self-titled album. Tommy is not cheered when he goes out to The Viper Room, hears more angry women (Sleater-Kinney) coming out of the speakers, and is not acknowledged as a celebrity by patrons at the bar. Things seem to be looking up when a dude in the bathroom recognizes him…until it turns out to be from the tape. This fan’s cheerful comment that it’s the best thing Tommy’s done since Girls, Girls, Girls nearly a decade earlier is not, in Tommy’s opinion, a compliment, and fisticuffs ensue.

The report of the incident gets Pam hauled in to see her publicist Gail, who scolds that Tommy’s train wreck antics will make Pam a train wreck by association. Pam promises it won’t happen again, whereupon Gail idly asks what the fight was about. Pam hesitates, but finally tells Gail about the tape, which she swears is still “super-underground.” Gail does a quick search of the relatively few print publications that have, in recent months, launched websites, and confirms that there hasn’t been any reporting on it yet…but there are a lot of sites that are selling it. Pam goes home to complain to Tommy that the tape has been bootlegged and accuse him of liking the attention he’s gotten from it and wanting to sabotage her career, which he hotly denies, screaming before he storms out of the bedroom, “BY THE WAY, I SOLD 100 MILLION FUCKING ALBUMS.” True, but: not lately!

What Gail and Pam don’t know is how close this story is getting to the mainstream: Jay Leno’s monologue writers know that, as of now, it does not meet Leno’s personal standard of a reference that even the episode’s titular Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth will be familiar with. Alicia Krentz (Irene Choi), a journalist at the L.A. Times, has also gotten a copy of the tape and tries to pitch it to her editor, lying as it does at the intersection of celebrity, privacy, and the internet; he dismisses it as tabloid fodder. Undeterred, Alicia calls Tommy for comment; while Pam tries to stop him, he barks back that he has nothing to say about being burgled and orders her to fuck off. She does not, instead building her case for her editor by getting a copy of the police report.

Pam is in the bedroom, trying to manifest everything she wants in life — for the tape to fade away, Barb Wire to be a big success, huge sales for Tommy’s new album, and another pregnancy — when Tommy rages in: he just heard from his bandmate, Nikki Sixx (Iker Amaya), that Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione has the tape. Given the rivalry between him and Hugh Hefner, in whose Playboy Pam has posed many times, Tommy is certain that Guccione is going to publish screen shots from the tape, and that they need to sue him so he doesn’t. (That Tommy is feeling emasculated at the moment, having just lost Mötley Crüe’s prized recording studio to their new label-mates, Third Eye Blind, is surely contributing to his aggressiveness.) This is NOT what Pam wants, but she ends up in a law firm conference room with Tommy anyway, getting lectured about why they need to take pre-emptive action. Pam tries to explain her concerns — that Guccione may have no plans for the tape, but that getting sued could make him antagonistic; and that filing a lawsuit will only draw attention to the tape that, thus far, it has not attracted — to no avail.

Cut to a meeting with Guccione (Maxwell Caulfield) and his lawyers, agreeing in response that they can’t back down from this First Amendment challenge. “Pull twenty frames,” Guccione orders. “The nastiest pics.”

Back to the Times, where Alicia updates her editor on the state of play: “Now is it news?”

Now it is news, and Gail is not happy, visiting Pam in her trailer at Baywatch to (gently) reproach her for not having brought this to Gail first. Pam faintly tries to parrot Tommy’s and his lawyers’ position, but Gail knows what she’s doing, and encourages her to learn how to say no to men. Pam desperately tries to convince herself, and Gail, that no one will even see this item…on the front page of the Los Angeles Times‘s Entertainment section, but she is, of course, wrong, as another montage shows it being read by Hugh Hefner (Mike Seely), a Baywatch producer, Nikki, and everyone in Leno’s writers’ room; even the Seattle cam guy sees it in his local paper. Apparently the reporter from Glamour has seen it too, based on a message Gail leaves on Pam and Tommy’s machine. We don’t see Pam react to this, which is a shame, since we know how excited she was to be covered in a women’s magazine for a change. We do see her and Tommy watch Leno (Adam Ray) making his first rude and unoriginal monologue jokes about the tape. The story has spread to Duluth.

And the lawsuit Pam did not want is proceeding: as the episode closes, she receives notice that she, and not Tommy, is being deposed. Tommy tries to shrug it off — what is there to say other than “That’s our shit, quit it!”? They’re in this together, he adds.

But Pam is not so sure. And for this to be the final moment of the episode highlights, again, the contradiction at the heart of this series: how can you profess to be sensitively telling the story of the biggest violation of Pam’s life — when people she did not know and to whom she did not grant permission profited from exploiting her — without recognizing that the very existence of this series is a violation, too?

VHS Rewinder

• Where’s Rand? Good question! At the end of “The Master Beta,” we saw him barely escape the bikers who’d come to his apartment and seek sanctuary with Erica, but he’s not in this episode at all. Other than, you know, his connection to the tape, the only glimpse of his existence comes when Pellicano kicks open his apartment door and finds every trace of Rand gone, other than the hole he left in the wall. Not that I necessarily wanted this very zippy episode to be longer, but how did he manage to move his whole life out between tough-guy visits? If Pellicano and the bikers stopped surveilling the place long enough for him to do it, they deserve to lose him.
• In the course of dressing down Pam about Tommy’s embarrassing headlines, Gail notes, “You don’t see Hard Copy doing a story on Sandra Bullock’s husband getting tossed out of the Viper Room.” Sure you don’t — Sandra Bullock wouldn’t get married until 2005 — but maybe Gail just meant someone at her level. That said: when Bullock DID get married, she also had to endure the reflection of her husband’s negative press.
• And speaking of that Viper Room fight: while there was a real-life incident at the club, it was (a) much later in 1996 than we are in the show’s timeline; (b) involved Lee attacking a paparazzo; and (c) Pam was present.
• If Bob Guccione looked familiar, it may be because of your repeat viewings of Grease 2? He played the lead, Michael Carrington, opposite Michelle Pfeiffer. He’s also remembered by Gen X for his appearance as Jason, the lawyer who dates Brenda thinking she’s a college student, in the series premiere of Beverly Hills, 90210. Earlier this year, he appeared in the Hallmark movie Butlers In Love — so between his role as a very proper English butler there and a notorious pornographer here, Caulfield is really running the gamut in 2022.

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.