THE ROUSH REVIEW

Outrageous true stories (Pam & Tommy, Anna) deliver the drama

- MATT ROUSH

STRANGER THAN FICTION: That's the allure of any juicy docudrama, embellishing larger-than-life stories for maximum entertainment value. Hulu's unexpectedly exhilarating eight-part Pam & Tommy does just that, taking the lurid subject matter of a purloined celebrity sex tape and expanding it into an homage to the bygone 1990s-VCRs, dial-up internet, Tower Records-by way of a genuine love story and a vengeful caper gone sideways.

Lily James and Sebastian Stan are sensational as Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, the Baywatch sex kitten and volatile rock star, whose lust-at-first-sight relationship and careers hit the rocks after a graphically intimate video is stolen from their safe and marketed on a newfangled platform called a website. The culprit: Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen, sympathetically nebbishy), a contractor with an avenging-angel complex whom Tommy foolishly stiffs in one of his fits of immature anger.

Rand sees himself as an agent of karma and the sex tape an instrument of justice, but payback works both ways when Rand learns about bootlegging and how hard it is to control anything on the World Wide Web. With sleazy associates like Andrew Dice Clay (as a loan shark) and Nick Offerman (a porn producer), Rand was always doomed-but for Pam and Tommy, the humiliation cuts deep as the personal becomes public and their hedonistic happiness sours amid a cacophony of tabloid and late-night mockery.