The return of "Absolutely Fabulous"

Edina and Patsy, living casualties of the '60s, face life in a post-millennium, "Sex and the City" world.

By Carina Chocano

Nov 15, 2001 | Nov. 12, 2001

Dear Diary:

There's a scene from an early "Absolutely Fabulous" episode in which Eddy, the shambling, lost Baby Boomer mom, remarks to her daughter Saffron, who couldn't care less, "You know, Patsy used to date Keith Moon."

To which Patsy, Eddy's best friend and the realist of the two, replies, "Well, sort of. I woke up underneath him in a hotel room once."

It might not have been love, exactly, but it was something, they think, whatever it was. And their proximity to it, even if only in their minds, makes them important and fabulous.

"Who dies in their own vomit these days?" Patsy asks.

"Nobody!" shouts Eddy, bloated with indignant pride.

"Absolutely Fabulous," which returned to Comedy Central Monday night with the first of six episodes after a four-year hiatus, has the distinction of being the only show about the Me generation to suggest that most of its members weren't so much leading the revolution as maladroitly mouthing the words to the eponymous song in the back seat of a Volkswagen, like characters out of a badly dubbed Japanese monster movie, before falling out face-first onto the pavement. Like most people who look back on the '60s with a sense of proprietary pride, Eddy and Patsy were never integral to the scene, despite their continued and desperate efforts. The self-involved, celebrity-obsessed world that was set in motion in their youth drones on, like a tedious, never-ending party, and Eddy and Patsy -- always the star-fuckers, never the stars -- are still trying to crash it, osteoporosis and menopause be damned.

For those who managed to miss it the first three times around (the show had three six-episode seasons in 1992, 1994 and 1996 and has been in heavy rotation ever since on various cable channels), "Ab Fab" follows the misadventures of Edina "Eddy" Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders, who also writes the show), a chain-smoking, champagne-guzzling, pill-popping, twice-divorced 40ish publicist in too-sizes-too-small Burberry (formerly Lacroix); and her best friend Patsy "Pats" Stone (Joanna Lumley), a promiscuous, desiccated Ivana Trump look-alike in her 50s, who supposedly works as a fashion magazine editor and has eaten nothing but a single potato chip since 1974. Saffy (Julia Sawalha) is Eddy's dour, purportedly dumpy daughter, a premature nag who has spent her joyless life mothering her mother while fending off insults from her rival and arch-nemesis Patsy. (Patsy's first impulse, on finding out that Edina was pregnant a quarter of a century ago, was to dramatically demand a knitting needle.)

In an upcoming episode, Saffy pens a tell-all play about her childhood called "Self-raising Flower," and hires a fat actress to play her mother. Eddy, in turn, threatens to confront her about it on Ricki Lake.

Obviously, not a lot has changed for Patsy and Edina, the world's most unevolved humans, since we last saw them -- except that they keep getting older and the anti-aging technology keeps getting better. Within the first few minutes of the first new episode, Eddy is a riot of emotional activity -- talking about embarking on yet another new weight-loss program ("In three weeks I want to be on the cusp of organ failure"), faking her way through various yoga poses ("Pretty soon I'll be able to kiss my own ass from both directions"), skating across the kitchen on an adult mini-scooter and putting in her daily call to her "life coach," who tells her her goal for the day is to "have a great idea and write a pop song" -- all the while obsessing about meeting Madonna and Sting and getting famous. Meanwhile, Patsy has shot her face full of "Paralox," an industrial-strength Botox-like toxin that leaves her face so stiff and expressionless she has to feel for her lips to plug a cigarette through them.

Next Page: Older and sadder, but more fabulous as well

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