The Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy could have had a fascinating focus. We see glimpses of it in the first minute, on a grainy TV screen where Jay Leno (played by the comedian Adam Ray) is interviewing Pamela Anderson (Lily James). “Speaking of sex, and I have to ask,” Leno says, throwing his hands up and down in the faux-innocent shrug of someone just asking questions. “The tape.” The audience audibly inhales. Anderson, whom James imitates in uncanny fashion—the protruding tongue, the hands perched nervously on crossed legs, the slightly hunched posture—plays similarly dumb. “What tape, Jay?” she breathes. Leno casually twists the knife. “What’s that like?” he says. “What’s it like to have that kind of exposure?” The camera zooms in on Anderson’s pained face as she grapples with her response.

The choice to mediate our first glimpse of Anderson through multiple screens is, perhaps, telling; it has a distancing effect that keeps her at arm’s length. Pam & Tommy is an eight-part miniseries about how an intimate home movie—made by Anderson and her then-husband, the rock star Tommy Lee, on their honeymoon—became the first viral celebrity sex tape. With the Leno scene, the show suggests sensitivity for Anderson’s plight (the tape was stolen by an irate contractor and sold online without her consent). Then it abruptly changes course. The scene that follows, set one year earlier, shows a carpenter, Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), trying to focus on construction work in a Malibu mansion as Anderson and Lee (Sebastian Stan) go at it loudly upstairs. This is how the series really sees Anderson: Woman Victimized by the Culture, but also Woman Unabashedly Banging Her Heart Out.

Pam & Tommy, notably, hasn’t been sanctioned by Anderson, who has ignored all attempts by the series’ writers and stars to get in touch with her, and who is reportedly appalled by yet another distillation of her life and career down to the moment when she was most appallingly exploited. In response, the show’s lead director, Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya), has said that reclaiming Anderson’s narrative was part of the point of the series—that the people involved “absolutely respect [her] privacy” and wanted to use the series to change the “perspective of what happened.”

Erin Simkin / Hulu

Really? I don’t necessarily doubt the good intentions of the showrunners, Robert Siegel and D. V. DeVincentis, and their show—in moments—does succeed at communicating the ordeal Anderson endured and the many different forces that colluded in her suffering. But you’re not respecting her privacy when you re-create a sex tape that was stolen and viewed by hundreds of millions of people without her permission. You aren’t reclaiming her narrative on her behalf if she insists that she doesn’t want you to do so. The show’s creators would be better off just stating the truth: They wanted to tell Anderson’s story because it’s a good story, and its revelations have deeply informed the mess of celebrity and internet culture that we wallow in today. Even the fact that she resisted participating in the show is telling: What Anderson wants for herself has always mattered less than the desires she incites in others.

Critiquing Pam & Tommy as a single, unified work is hard because it’s such an awkward hybrid of genres and ideas. Based on a 2014 Rolling Stone story about Gauthier, the contractor with a grudge who accidentally introduced revenge porn to mainstream America, it’s equal parts caper, raunch comedy, romance (“the greatest love story ever sold” is the tagline), and cultural analysis. A scene in which Lee converses with his puppetized penis (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas) is ripped right from his memoir but feels derivative of Big Mouth. Meanwhile, an episode about a legal deposition Anderson gives while suing Penthouse—written by Sarah Gubbins (Shirley, Better Things) and directed by Hannah Fidell (A Teacher)—straightforwardly parses all the ways Anderson was ritualistically humiliated in the ’90s for daring people to look at her.

[Read: Where sex positivity falls short]

The first episode hardly features Anderson at all. It’s focused on the conflict between Gauthier—like so many Rogenite heroes, an endearing naif whose interests include marijuana and masturbation—and Lee, who’s hired him to manifest a project the rock star has envisioned as a “fucking futuristic, state-of-the-art love pad 2000.” Lee is an unexploded bomb. The puppeteer Frank Oz once said that Animal, the frenzied drummer he performed as on The Muppet Show, could be summed up in five words—drums, sleep, sex, food, and pain—and the same goes for Stan’s portrayal of Lee, with trunkfuls of pharmaceuticals thrown into the mix. The Mötley Crüe drummer is heavily tattooed, priapic, and … surprisingly sweet? To watch Pam & Tommy after living through the tabloid coverage of their relationship—the beach wedding, the hepatitis, the kids, the breakup, the domestic abuse, the jail sentence, the reunions—is to feel uncomfortably like you’re rooting for them, these crazy kids who take endless baths, are dying to have a family together, and don’t have sex until their wedding night (four days after their first date).

Their downfall, though, is inevitable. After Lee fires Gauthier and waves a shotgun in his face, Gauthier, an “amateur theologian,” decides that karma is taking too long and cooks up a revenge plot. He cases the Malibu home for several weeks, breaks in one night, and steals a safe, which contains cash and jewelry, numerous guns, and an unmarked video tape. That tape, he discovers, contains an explicit home movie filmed on a yacht during Anderson and Lee’s honeymoon. He shows the tape to a porn director he knows, Milton “Uncle Miltie” Ingley (Nick Offerman, in fine sober-unhinged form), who immediately appraises its value. “This is so private,” Ingley says. “It’s like we’re seeing something we’re not supposed to be seeing … which is kind of what makes it so fucking hot.”

The pair’s efforts to monetize the tape allow the show to make broader points: The series positions the Anderson-Lee video as not just a debauched tabloid frenzy, but a moment that actually changed the world—a fracturing of established mores in American life (about privacy, sex, celebrity, commerce) at the hands of the internet. Here was a new, unregulated marketplace without any standards or legal precedents. The porn industry at the time required signed releases to sell videos of adults engaging in sexual intercourse; the internet meant that Gauthier could sell the tape he’d stolen without restriction. But it meant that anyone else could too. What had been a business was now suddenly a free-for-all for anyone with an explicit video and an agenda. (Siegel, Pam & Tommy’s co-showrunner, seems intrigued by historical turning points in American capitalism—he wrote the script for The Founder, the story of how Ray Kroc ruthlessly turned McDonald’s into an incomparable business empire.)

Naturally, this shift was bad news for women. The way Pam & Tommy tells the story doesn’t so much reclaim her narrative as manipulate it to draw bigger conclusions. The major beats of her life story are there: her “discovery” at a football game, her first audition for Playboy, her elevation to icon status via a prime-time beach soap and a strategically tailored red bathing suit. James looks so similar to Anderson in some scenes that the lines between truth and fiction seem to wobble a little. And the English actress captures what may be the heart of Anderson: She describes herself, in one early scene, as just “a good Christian girl from small-town Canada,” and she’s resolutely sweet and courteous to almost every person she meets. But in Pam & Tommy, Anderson comes to represent more than herself—she’s an avatar for every woman who’s ever been slut-shamed or abused, or who’s ever suffered a loss too poignant to bear. She’s a foil for men like Gauthier to have their own moments of revelation. “Oh man, I feel terrible for women,” he tells his ex-wife (Taylor Schilling), a character patently created for these kinds of discussions. “They gotta deal with us.”

For Anderson, maybe the fact that she’s less a person in the show than a collection of tropes and stories animated into a whole is some consolation. But I doubt it. The more we rely on these narratives of ’90s revisionism to confront the flaws in our own past thinking, the more responsibility we have to wonder who’s being served in the process. Is it right to take a painful invasion of privacy that was turned into mass entertainment and turn it into mass entertainment again, even if the motivations have changed? Have they changed? I enjoyed this show. It made me think about Anderson differently—as someone who’s survived extraordinary victimization and typecasting and who’s managed to redefine how she’s perceived. (Whether steadfast defender of Julian Assange trumps Baywatch babe depends on your worldview, I guess.) But the series, which so often feels like it’s trying to atone for our old mistakes, seems intent on pointing out ethical transgressions while looking right past the notable void at its own core.

In 2019, a 60-year-old Emma Thompson explained her sudden career renaissance. She had spent her youth playing romantic leads, but once she turned 40, she said, she could fill such roles only “in a pinch.” The offers became more limited, the parts smaller: a batty clairvoyant in the Harry Potter series; a wronged wife in Love Actually; the voice inside Will Ferrell’s head in Stranger Than Fiction. Then another decade passed, and the opportunities became interesting again. Hallelujah! In the past five years alone, Thompson has played a High Court judge in The Children Act, an uptight television host in Late Night, and the British prime minister (twice).

Thompson had experienced what we might call “the dry decade.” The midlife plight of women in Hollywood was immortalized in an Amy Schumer sketch that achieved instant cult status when it aired six years ago. Three actresses are enjoying a picnic in a wooded glade, celebrating one of their number’s “Last Fuckable Day.” The women around the table—Patricia Arquette, Tina Fey, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—are all attractive, smart, and funny. But that doesn’t matter. They’re over the hill in Hollywood’s eyes. Fey notes that eventually, women realize that the poster for their movie is “just, like, a picture of a kitchen.” Louis-Dreyfus adds that such films have “these very uplifting and yet vague titles, like Whatever It Takes or She Means Well.”

In 2012, two economists from Clemson University analyzed the gender balance of American films from 1920 to 2011 and offered a more wonkish take on the phenomenon. Overall, they found that men accounted for two-thirds of all roles in mainstream movies. For starring roles, however, age is everything. At 20, women play four-fifths of leads: Hollywood is very interested in them at their nubile prime. Fast-forward to 40, and that statistic is reversed. Men utterly dominate the juiciest parts. The male-female gender split then hovers around 80–20 until, well, death.

[Read: When Hollywood’s power players were women]

For the few women actors who come out the other side of the dry decade, the rewards can be mixed. No longer able to portray ingenues, brides-to-be, or manic pixie dream girls, or be the Avengers’ diversity hire (sorry, Black Widow), older actresses graduate into the other popular category open to women: hags and harpies. Meryl Streep once described the parts she was offered after 50 as women who were “gorgons or dragons or in some way grotesque.” Sure enough, Thompson’s late-career roles also include the Baroness in Cruella, Goneril in a TV-movie version of King Lear, and Miss Trunchbull in the upcoming musical adaptation of Matilda. Monsters, one and all.

But biology, it turns out, needn’t be destiny. A new generation of actresses has discovered an answer to the dry decade, and is showing the rest of us what we’ve been missing—stories that capture the fullness of women’s lives.

To understand the problem (and because the experience is always pleasant), consider Tom Hanks. He might be “America’s Dad,” but his career represents a type of ageless versatility long afforded by the film industry—to male actors. In his 30s, Hanks wooed Elizabeth Perkins in Big, Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, and Robin Wright in Forrest Gump. (I am excluding Beasley, the dog from Turner & Hooch, from this analysis, though IMDb sadly records that Beasley never worked again.) Hanks’s next decade was anything but dry. In his 40s, he played an FBI agent in Catch Me If You Can, a Mob enforcer in Road to Perdition, Woody in Toy Story, and a man stranded on a deserted island in Cast Away, among other roles.

But what about his female co-stars? Their 40s were not exactly dazzling. At 41, Meg Ryan jettisoned her sweet, goofy image in In the Cut, playing an English teacher drawn into a sexual relationship with a potential serial killer. The critical reception dwelled on the film’s erotic atmosphere, and Ryan’s onscreen nudity was greeted as an unwelcome surprise. She has since said that the film marked a “turning point” from which her career never recovered.

Neither Elizabeth Perkins nor Robin Wright fared well in the film industry, either. But they did have success elsewhere—and this is where the story of the dry decade takes an intriguing turn. Perkins spent her mid-to-late 40s on Showtime’s Weeds, as the lead character’s narcissist neighbor, Celia—and earned three Emmy nominations for the role. At 46, Wright started playing Claire Underwood in House of Cards, and by the final season had graduated from first lady to president.

Perkins and Wright were among the first wave of women to benefit from the golden age of television. Since then, the streaming wars have created a huge demand for new dramas, and the increased opportunities are obvious. In her 40s, Reese Witherspoon has starred in Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, and The Morning Show. (As a bonus, the last of these also rescued Jennifer Aniston from a film industry that never quite seemed to know what to do with her.) The HBO remake of Scenes From a Marriage gave 44-year-old Jessica Chastain a role every bit as challenging as an Ibsen heroine. At 46, Sandra Oh began playing a weary spy locked in a deadly pas de deux with a glamorous assassin in Hulu’s Killing Eve. And at the same age, Kate Winslet undertook one of the standout roles of her career, as Mare Sheehan, the stoic detective in HBO’s Mare of Easttown.

Compared with the dead ends that Ryan, Perkins, and Wright encountered in traditional Hollywood, the trajectory for female stars is thriving on the competition among HBO, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and others. A glut of roles now combine the personal and the professional, offering a chance not to be pigeonholed as “the wife” or “the mom”—or, conversely, the career woman free of domestic responsibilities. Think about the dry decade: It has amounted to a desert of roles between love interest and empty nester, as Hollywood has struggled to incorporate the challenges of motherhood into narratives about women engaged elsewhere too.

[From the December 2009 issue: Double-X films]

The 2010 film Salt, about a CIA spy accused of being a Russian sleeper agent, is a notorious example of the basic motherhood problem. Originally intended for Tom Cruise, the script was rewritten for its eventual star, Angelina Jolie. That entailed one big change: Edwin Salt was a parent; Evelyn Salt was not. “If a woman had a child, I think it would be very hard for us not to imagine her kind of holding on to that child through the entire film,” Jolie said at the time. “Which is strange—but I think audiences would allow a man to have a child and the child [could] be with the wife back at home.” (When making Salt, Jolie herself was a working mother of six children, including 2-year-old twins.)

Television series are hungry for plotlines, and their cast lists spread like tree roots as seasons progress, giving women new room to grow. In stark contrast to the narrowness of Jolie’s role in Salt, Keri Russell transitioned from her late 30s into her 40s as Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans, navigating the identities of mother, travel agent, and Soviet spy. In The Queen’s Gambit, deft touches filled out the portrait of Beth Harmon’s alcoholic adoptive mother, Alma, played by Marielle Heller, who had recently turned 40.

In accommodating characters who are mothers, without that being their only identity, television has brought new tensions and texture to established genres. Where male detectives have tended—to the point of cliché—to be troubled, maverick loners, Olivia Colman’s Ellie Miller found her investigations complicated by her own family turmoil and deep links to the local town in the British crime show Broadchurch. Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan is similarly embedded in her community, at the center of a loving, chaotic, and grieving clan in the kind of suburb where everyone has secrets and everyone is trying to cope: with addiction, with loss, with something as mundane as America’s lack of affordable child care.

The wide-angle lens of television invites immersion in a pivotal midlife decade that—for anyone juggling a career, children, and aging parents, as well as their own compromises, regrets, and unfulfilled ambitions—is anything but dry. “I always imagined I’d be a cop,” Mare tells a younger police officer. “It’s the life around me I didn’t expect to fall apart so spectacularly.”

This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “Women of a Certain Age.”