Why do I love Pam Anderson, star of E!’s new eight-part “observational documentary” Pam: Girl on the Loose? It’s not just her Hindenberg hooters. Granted, the Stacked star is so “inclined to fall in the noonday soupplate” (as James Joyce put it) that she’s starred on 11 Playboy covers.

No, I like her for her sassy attitude toward the bliss-blimp fun puppets she called “Pancho” and “Lefty” while introducing them individually on her 2005 hit Comedy Central roast, crediting them with her success. That was the high point of her career, loose and fun in a way that, say, Baywatch (a show Pam claims she’s never watched) is not. She displays the same attitude (though one never knows if they’re quite the same breasts) in her new E! quasi-reality show, wiggling her chest in mock-Marilyn irony and whispering, “This is a bust!”

She’s not just ironic, she’s in earnest. On the show, she targets her torpedoes on Capitol Hill, to raise awareness for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Her PETA activist pal explains why Pam’s bazooms are just the bazooka truth needs in these dire times: “In Washington, there’s so much competition for attention that you’ve gotta crash cymbals — or jiggle symbols.” Pam’s bilateral outreach catches George Bush’s eye at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: he says, “Pamela Anderson and Mitt Romney in the same room — isn’t that one of the signs of the Apocalypse?”

Pam’s game in the E! series, but way too in-control. She warns us straight up not to expect the kind of show made famous by The Osbournes or, God rest her sad soul, Anna Nicole Smith. “This is not a reality show,” she warns. “I would never conceive of doing a reality show … you will not see kids.”

“So what can we expect to see?” asks an offscreen voice. Pam sighs a sigh as deep as Karl Rove’s effrontery. “These,” she murmurs, flashing Pancho and Lefty, “and this” (she flips her skirt over her derriere), “but there’s much more of me than that. But I’ll let you see that too. Hahahaha!”

In fact, she doesn’t show us much. The naughty bits are vagued-up with flashy camera tricks, peekaboo cutting, and a palette almost as washed-out as George Lucas’s futuristically white-on-white film THX 1138.

The whole show is a tease. At her mammoth yard sale, where fans confess they’ve spent $1,400 in a day for stuff like Pam’s Baywatch bikini and first wedding dress, Pam counts all her old mattresses. “1, 2, 3, 4 … 18, 19, 20…. I was gonna say, I’ve slept — I’ve had sex on all of ‘em!”

Pam is of course famous for having sex in public, inadvertently, in the Tommy Lee honeymoon video (which no, I will not link to). Pam even had sex with the guy who had sex with Paris Hilton in her sex video. (My quickie review: Pam and Tommy Lee seemed like they might actually be having fun, while Paris looked like some nocturnal zombie.) Pam and Tommy joke about their infamous clinch. “I do very well with handheld video cameras,” quips Pam. “I say still do it, whatever. It was a freeing experience. Public humiliation is good for anybody.”

It was good for Pam’s career, anyway. But even more than the debacle of her film Barb Wire, whose humor was ruined by producers, Pam felt, the sex video made Pam swear that as God is her witness, she will never be out of the director’s chair again in her career or her private life. Good for her!

And bad for her show! The whole thing feels staged. She sells her old stuff, remodels her Malibu house, goes to a David LaChapelle photo shoot, tries to go with David to an Elton John concert they’re both involved with, and moves in with Tommy Lee temporarily while her own house is difficultly being built.

Pam keeps her promise. This is no reality show. There is no scrap of reality. It’s all a scripted product placement, a big ad for Pam’s career and political causes, and for her status as supermom. I’ll bet she really is a supermom, but you can’t tell from this show. Sure, she bawls Tommy Lee out for letting the kids watch Superbad, and it’s funny to hear him whine about being “thrown under the bus” by the kids for telling her.

The one big stress in the first episodes involves Pam’s new pool, dug near the beach, so it keeps filling with nasty water, causing cost overruns, and Pam’s scared birds will drown in it. Her jittery architect explains the problems to her accountants, but holds out for real glittery gold in the pool tiles instead of plainer, cheaper tiles. “The thing is, the house is very strict, straight, forthright lines. So without a little sparkle — boring!”

Pam: Girl on the Loose is not exactly boring, but it does not sparkle, and it goes every which way but loose. It’s like a Malibu beachside Xanadu with a big sign outside: STAY OUT.