Between Barb Wire and The Last Showgirl

Easy as it may be to forget in this age of "prestige TV" making "serious drama" synonymous with the small screen as the big is increasingly the purview of big, splashy spectacle, it was once the case that TV was a distant second to film in cultural standing and general desirability as a career for those in show business, while the film actor regarded TV as beneath them, and indeed the kind of thing that might damage their brand, as the TV actor aspired to "graduate" from television to film stardom. Some did (like Fresh Prince of Bel Aire's Will Smith), many didn't (like NYPD Blue's David Caruso)--with the luckier among the latter getting to go on working in TV (David Caruso, for instance, after failing to become a movie star, having a good long run on the small screen in CSI: Miami).

Pamela Anderson was a small screen star in 1996 when she got her chance to be a lead in a feature film, the comic book adaptation Barb Wire. The movie didn't accomplish what was hoped for her from it, and she didn't really get another chance either, Anderson remaining a small screen star for a few years as she moved on from Baywatch to another syndicated action series, V.I.P.--and then after that show's cancellation amid the collapse of the syndicated drama market, not much here either. In the main her career since, with the principal exception the short-lived FOX sitcom Stacked, has, as is the case with many who play an iconic character early in their career and never get the break that lets them get out from under its shadow, consisted of appearances in films and shows mainly for the purposes of making us say "Hey, that's Pamela Anderson!" (with, besides her extremely numerous appearances on reality and game shows all over the world, this also the case with her appearances in the James Gunn-scripted Scooby-Doo, Borat and, of course, the 2017 feature film version of Baywatch).

Looking at the raves with which the entertainment press has greeted Anderson's role in The Last Showgirl one might think that she has escaped that. Yet given the character she played in the drama one can also take it as simply an expression of that--her casting in that specific role arguably playing off of Pamela Anderson's being Pamela Anderson as much as any other she has undertaken, with this underlined by the extent to which the Academy Awards buzz, which spoke of an Oscar nomination for Jamie Lee Curtis much more than it did for the star of the movie (for whom such a nomination would have been far, far more meaningful than the award going to the long-established, respected, already Oscar-awarded Curtis), showing the limits to that community's readiness to take her seriously as an actress after all these years.