Stacked

It’s been a long time since Pamela Anderson’s been on the tube in something other than a cameo, game show, or cartoon voice — quite frankly, I didn’t think there was much else in the cards for her — so it was fun in a nostalgic sort of way to see that she’d beaten the odds (and the hep C, to boot, she says) and gotten herself back on the air.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing her for long; indeed, if the pilot of Stacked is a fair indicator of what the remaining five episodes are like, it may be a long, long time before we see Pam on TV again. The problem isn’t just that the show is utterly unoriginal — nearly all of it has clearly been filched from other sitcoms — but that it chose to take so much of its material from sitcoms that failed: First there’s Pamela’s character, who, instead of being the busty ingénue that made Pam worshipped around the globe when Baywatch was on, is the Pamela-as-media-creature parody that made Pam ignored around the globe when V.I.P. was on. (Stacked even lazily borrows V.I.P.’s reason to have Pam in the story, which is to be nothing more than sexy bait for male clients/customers.) Then there’s the setting and a couple of characters that appear to be lifted straight out of the second season of Ellen, a show Ellen DeGeneres had to out herself for to drum up any ratings. The obvious theft of the Niles and Lilith Krane characters from Frasier might not have been so bad if the ham-fisted impressions weren’t so painfully over-the-top. And even the Christopher Lloyd character was little more than a reprise of his perennially confused “Jim” from Taxi.

All this could easily be forgiven, of course, if the show was at all funny or clever. But it isn’t. Which is too bad, because already my fondness for Pam rests more on nostalgia than on anything else (especially now that her nipples have been freakishly stitched onto the tops of her boobs like blowholes), and the older she becomes, the fewer chances she’ll have to get another show — and the crappier her seat’ll be when she goes back for another stint on Hollywood Squares.