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Pamela Anderson, she of the Playboy spreads and PETA protests, wants people to know what her life is really like. It's not all sex videos and parties at the Playboy mansion, you know. This is a woman who does her own laundry, her own vacuuming, attends her kids' soccer games, gasses up her own car and buys her own groceries.

“My friends,” she says, “always come to me for advice like: ‘How do you do it all? I can't believe you don't have a nanny. I can't believe you're vacuuming. What are you doing? Put the vacuum cleaner down. You're making me look bad.' ”

For answers to those questions and some equally scintillating dialogue, viewers can tune in to Anderson's new series Pam: Girl on the Loose – not a reality show, she insists, but a documentary series. That distinction, as she explains during an interview this week in Vancouver, comes from both the production techniques and, especially, her insistence that she will not do anything on the show that's set up.

“I don't want to hear a list of things I'm going to do today. I'm not going to go get waxed today. You're not going to follow me to a spray-tan store, or whatever these people do. I don't do that,” says Anderson, 41.

“But I'm willing to show my lifestyle … and travel around the world, getting naked and saving animals.” (The televised nudity, for those who are suddenly interested, is fleetingly suggestive rather than full-on.)

The series was originally going to be about a new Las Vegas stage show built around Anderson, but when the model/actress found out she would have to actually move to Vegas and couldn't commute from Malibu, where she lives, she bailed. E!, however, still wanted to produce a series around Anderson's life – and she was game.

“I'm an exhibitionist, so how could I say no?” she says, wearing an all-white outfit: low-cut top, short shorts and high heels. One stipulation was that her children not be shown on camera.

Anderson, who was born in Ladysmith, B.C., on Vancouver Island, has had her fair share of, er, exposure since first being discovered at a B.C. Lions game in Vancouver almost 20 years ago.

Along with the Playboy centrefolds, the starring TV role in Baywatch, and the infamous sex tapes – co-starring her now ex-husband, Motley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee – that were leaked to the Internet, Anderson has become a permanent fixture in the tabloids. There was her stormy on-again-off-again relationship with Lee (the father of her two children), and her subsequent marriages to fellow musician Kid Rock (which ended in divorce) and Rick Salomon (which was annulled). Salomon, coincidentally, is best known for his role in another infamous sex tape, co-starring Paris Hilton. So why on earth would Anderson agree to offer up more personal details in a show of her own making?

“My dirty laundry? Well, everyone's seen it so far, but they've never really seen it from my perspective,” she explains. Still, she had her concerns. “E! was a very dangerous place to do this because obviously it's very celebrity-driven. But that's why I thought: Keep your enemies closer, right?”

Anderson is bubbly, friendly and speaks exceedingly quickly. She doesn't always finish her thoughts, and comes up with some ambiguous beauties. (“I loved animals more than people until I had kids and now I like them the same.”)

She doesn't shy away from personal details, revealing in Vancouver that she was up until 4 a.m. a couple of nights earlier “talking” with Lee (with whom she's bunking at the moment while her new house is being constructed), that she plans to vote for Barack Obama, and that she has a thing for hockey players.

But when it comes to her on-screen image, she's all business. She says E! has given her “100-per-cent control” over the television project (she has an executive-producer credit).

Still, she insists that this series is not about correcting any misconceptions about her sex life, her famous breasts or her level of intelligence. “I don't feel misunderstood and I'm not trying to change anybody's image of me,” she says. “But I think it will be shocking when people see how I really live my life.”

In the series' first six episodes, Anderson holds a garage sale, attends the White House Correspondents' Dinner, tries to launch a new line of lotions, and travels to Abu Dhabi where she plans to build a hotel.

And Ladysmith's most famous daughter promises Canada figures prominently in the series. There's a visit to the Formula One race in Montreal, and a site inspection at an 80-unit residential development she's building on waterfront property in Ladysmith that she bought from her grandmother.

Anderson says she plans to keep one of the units for herself so she can spend more time on the Island, close to family, and adds: “I want to bring my kids here as much as possible. I mean, more Canada, less L.A., more Whistler. We come to Whistler every year. And I have a lot of Canadian friends and I bring my kids around a lot of hockey players. 'Cause I think L.A. can be destructive on many levels.”

Anderson, who was born on the country's 100th birthday in 1967, is now a dual citizen. She and her kids have Canadian and U.S. passports. When she talks about “home,” however, she means Ladysmith.

Whatever one thinks of the series – or of Anderson's credentials – she believes the show is an empowering piece of television. As she runs around, sans nanny, doing laundry, cooking perogies and jetting off to Vegas, she is positioning herself as a role model for women everywhere.

“I think the message of the whole thing is that women can be everything,” she says. “You can be a great mom, you can be sexy, you can be wild and fun and stick up for yourself. I just think a woman can do everything.”

Pam: Girl on the Loose airs Tuesdays on E! at 10 p.m. ET/PT.