You might think Hulu’s Pam and Tommy miniseries is about a stolen sex tape. It is, but that Hi-8 video cassette tape is ultimately a kind of kindling for the dawn of the Internet age.
This fact isn’t lost on the producers who fill the tale of a stiffed handyman’s quest to make money off Baywatch star Pamela Anderson and Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee’s stolen tape with countless period tech touches that make clear that the Internet is the true fourth lead in this story after Lily James (Anderson), Sebastian Stan (Lee), and Seth Rogen (handyman Rand Gauthier).
Credit goes, in part, to Rogen who also serves as producer, for ensuring that all the details are right. Honestly, they have to be or the reason that the tape became such an international sensation makes little sense.
Back in 1995, there was no way to distribute content (salacious or otherwise) unless you used traditional channels: Movie houses, TV, big-name VHS distribution.
The type of mid-90s geek who might have been on BBS in the 1980s, Gauthier is the first to recognize that the burgeoning Internet might be a pathway to ill-gotten gains.
It’s not that 1995 and 1996’s World Wide Web was filled with e-commerce opportunities and streaming video. Quite the contrary.
We now live in a world where 4K streaming videos of the Olympic games from halfway around the world are available on our smartphones. The Internet of the mid-90’s was not the place to stream video content. At most, it was useful to share video files you could play offline. The very first South Park episode was an early example. It was shared widely across the Internet, but rarely, if ever, played online.
As Gauthier notes to an early purveyor of “online adult content,” streaming online video would not be a thing until the arrival of the 56K modem dial-up modem. At the time, most modem speeds maxed out at 9600 bits per second.
Amazon, which was founded in 1994 was growing fast, but buying books – really anything – online was still relatively new, as was the world of e-commerce.
In Pam and Tommy, there is no online transaction system on the website where Gauthier promotes the video, just an address to mail the checks.
Gauthier is a sleaze bag with the insight of a Zuckerberg, Bezos, or Gates. He recognizes the Internet as a contact and delivery system for then tens of thousands of people online and one that, at the time, could shield the proprietor from view. Back then it wasn’t so easy to figure out who owned a domain and the idea of identifying someone’s location via an IP address was still in its infancy.
However, what Pam and Tommy makes clear is that the tape’s existence on the web served as a sort of magnet for the still relatively new Information Super Highway. Even Pam and Tommy, who barely know what the Web is, are inexorably drawn to it.