Pamela Anderson Starred In A Forgotten Action-Comedy Series That Can’t Be Streamed Anywhere
Pamela Anderson starred in V.I.P. for four seasons, but the syndicated series isn't streaming anywhere.
Pamela Anderson’s most well-known television role has to be her portrayal of C.J. Parker in Baywatch, a role that saw her making an appearance 77 times across 11 seasons. But as the blond bombshell’s tenure on the beach-based action drama came to an end, Anderson embarked on a four-season run as bodyguard Vallery Irons, the protagonist in the action-comedy series V.I.P. Despite garnering a number of award nominations during its short run (including a Daytime Emmy Win), the entire V.I.P. series cannot be fully streamed anywhere aside from FUBO, where you can only catch the third and fourth seasons, but not the first two.
V.I.P. is a J.F. Lawton series executive produced by Pamela Anderson that has a simple, yet effective premise that lends itself to inherently good comedy with a healthy amount of camp. The series starts out with Pamela Anderson’s Vallery Irons, who is not a secret agent or bodyguard, but rather a hotdog vendor who by happenstance saves a movie star from an overzealous fan in the heat of the moment. In doing so, Irons catches the attention of a bodyguard agency that ultimately hires her and suggests that she becomes the now-famous face of the agency.
The agency renames itself to V.I.P. (Vallery Irons Protection) in an effort to boost its image, but it quickly becomes evident that Irons is not the skilled bodyguard that she was thought to be. In fact, she demonstrates her incompetence early on, and most of the comedy comes from the fact that she ends up defeating the antagonists anyway, despite her obvious lack of investigative skills. Another source of comedy in the series is the fact that Pamela Anderson was smart enough to play into the tabloid treatment she experienced in real life, and in doing so, gave the show quite a bit of tongue-in-cheek charm that was loosely based on her experience as somebody who was always making headlines at the time.
Piggybacking off of the level of self-referential humor that V.I.P. boasts, the early seasons (which aren’t streaming) also featured cameos from Stone Cold Steve Austin, Jay Leno, Charles Barkley, and Jerry Springer playing fictionalized versions of themselves. We also see a young Bryan Cranston in the pilot episode of the series, but he didn’t have the star-power that he has today, so he’s playing a washed-up actor named Colt Arrow. But that’s not the only Breaking Bad alum we see in the series, as Dean Norris also has a minor role in the pilot in his portrayal of a militia leader named Jackson Lasaar.
So even if you aren’t a fan of Pamela Anderson, we’re trying to say that Walter White and ASAC Hank Schrader first had a run-in 10 years prior to the events that unfolded in Breaking Bad. Though it’s a stretch, we can’t help but wonder if Pamela Anderson is somehow indirectly responsible for forging such an iconic union of adversaries in her series about a hotdog vendor turned bodyguard with the pilot episode of V.I.P.
At the end of the day, the premise of this Pamela Anderson series is absolutely ridiculous if you view it through a critical lens. When it comes to entertainment value, however, there’s a reason that V.I.P. is considered to be one of those “guilty pleasure” shows. Seriously, how many times is a mercenary going to get blindsided by a scantily clad babe who’s operating a semi-automatic weapon that she’s never used until the prior scene?
We’re going to make a massive logical leap here and speculate as to why V.I.P. had the charm it did despite its absurd premise.
When the heavy metal band Pantera was in their prime, they released a number of home movies that showed the general public that they weren’t these intimidating larger-than-life rock stars who were absolutely unapproachable. In viewing these tour diaries, we learned that the biggest heavy metal band in the world had some of the most down-to-earth dudes who just wanted to party, play loud music, and pull pranks on each other. You could draw a similar comparison to Pamela Anderson’s role in V.I.P. in the sense that she was (and still is) this sex icon superstar who had a very volatile personal life at the time but still came off as approachable in the sense that she didn’t take herself too seriously during her media interactions.
When you watch V.I.P., it’s immediately evident that Pamela Anderson has always had a sense of humor about her personal life and is, more often than not, incredibly self-aware about who she is as a private person and how she’s represented in the media. In other words, starring in and producing a show like V.I.P. only helped Pamela Anderson’s reputation during this phase of her career because we saw a different side of the actress that showed us a sense of humor and a willingness to take a joke.
