A lot of the show’s barely-controlled chaos can be laid at the feet of
“Separate your price from your worth,” Hugh Hefner paternally warns Pamela Anderson (Lily James) nearly two-thirds of the way through Hulu’s new limited series “Pam & Tommy,” about the theft and distribution of Pamela’s honeymoon sex tape with her husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan), whom she married after a whirlwind four-day romance. It’s the first real piece of advice anyone’s given her about the explosive career she’s about to have—first as Playboy Playmate in the late ‘80s, then a TV bombshell on “Baywatch”—and, ignoring the dubiousness of the source, speaks to the thematic territory showrunner Robert Siegel and EP Craig Gillespie want to cover. It’s a show about a very specific moment in history, where the ‘90s was set to change the world forever with the rise of celebrity gossip mags and the mass reach of the Internet. But it’s also more broadly about the public’s relationship with celebrity, and the entitlement the average person feels to accessing...