The creators of 'Pam & Tommy' knew they had a hit when Pap's photos hit the tabloids

Welcome to It's A Success! In this series, IndieWire talks to the creators and showrunners behind some of our favorite Emmy-nominated TV shows about when they realized their show was becoming a hit.

Last year, the internet went wild when the first images of actors Lily James and Sebastian Stan recreating the famous photo of Pamela Anderson biting then-husband Tommy Lee's nipple ring hit the internet.

The audience was amazed at how much the actors, especially James, looked like real people. For James, his dedication to portraying Anderson accurately was paramount. In a previous interview with IndieWire, she talked about wearing a blonde wig to walk around Hollywood to see how people would react. According to series creators Robert Siegel and D.V. DeVincentis, it was like James donning a "superhero" costume, with the actress getting up before anyone else to have prosthetics applied to her face and walk into the role of Pamela Anderson.

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Like James, Anderson herself was the fan Siegel and DeVincentis most hoped to impress, they told IndieWire via Zoom. Given the rise of #MeToo and other cultural reassessments of women in the industry, they knew they couldn't just rest on aesthetic similarity, but also showcase the important themes that caused such such a stir. undue stress on Anderson at this point in his life.

Editor's Note: Interview has been edited for clarity.

IndieWire: How did you think people would react to the show when you started?

Robert Siegel: It was my first TV project. I come from the world of independent cinema where success is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I felt like it was a hit it had almost nothing to do with how the show was received it was just the fact that it was going to be on a streaming service major seen by - I always, frankly, don't know how many people saw it. But I knew an exponential number of people would see it.

D.V. DeVincentis: Yeah, it's really hard to know what's going to happen, especially at a nascent stage like figuring out whether or not you want to write something. You're really lucky if something you're really passionate about makes you want to live with it for months or even years, and people are happy to see it.

After the show was released, was there a moment?

DeVincentis: The big moment for me was when paparazzi took a photo of Lily in the Baywatch set and leaked it. People went absolutely crazy, like it broke the internet. That's when I knew there was an appetite for it, and that's also when I knew the story we were going to bring was going to land from some way. Because our version of the story is not what the public had built up to at the time, so we were going to indulge in nostalgia for the real story.