The return of "Absolutely Fabulous"

Maybe it has something to do with so much American comedy using women primarily as decorative straight men, but it is precisely Patsy and Eddy's grotesqueness that makes them lovable and supremely cool. After "Roseanne," American TV sitcom heroines have only gotten thinner, cuter and better-dressed -- even if they are ostensibly married to obese UPS deliverymen and live in Queens. American versions of "Ab Fab" have been assayed before and abandoned. The short-lived "High Society" suffered from terminal sitcom-y remove, and "Cybill," which was supposedly modeled on the British hit, tempered Christine Baranski with an "accessible" Cybill Shepherd and her gorgeous, fashionably sullen teenage daughter. Even Roseanne herself tried and failed to produce a version of "Ab Fab," as ABC ultimately balked at the characters' unseemly behavior.

If any American show that has been influenced by "Ab Fab" has succeeded, it's HBO's megahit "Sex and the City." (Of course, HBO is a pay cable channel and can broadcast what it wishes.) But while the "Sex" girls may have some bad habits, they are pretty much limited to one per customer. Carrie can smoke, Miranda can bitch, the supersexed Samantha may approximate "Ab Fab" levels of parody; and the four will continue to grapple with what in their world constitute "problems." On "SATC," smoking never leads to coughing, drinking never leads to drunkenness, outlandish outfits never look anything but perfect on Sarah Jessica Parker's dancer's body. It is an axiom of the show that Carrie will never split her seams and Samantha will never repel a 20-year old hunk.

And the four women will never stop being paragons of skinny, groomed, spike-heeled civility, success and glamour; and they will never live in a dehumanizing world -- like the postwar England the "Ab Fab" women grew up in -- in which one has to reinvent oneself to survive, however ridiculous the results of that process seems now. Reports are that Pats and Eddy will specifically dis "Sex and the City" in a future show; it will be a cry of despair from the two, at four youngsters who do not appreciate that Patsy and Edina's ruin helped built the world through which they glide so happily.

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If America can't produce characters to rival "Ab Fab's" sense of the grotesque, however, it can churn them out in real life. On Nov. 20, Cinemax will air "Fashion Victim: The Killing of Gianni Versace." The documentary weaves together interviews with friends and family of the designer and his killer, Andrew Cunanan -- including such colorful characters as "fashion guru" Malcolm McLaren, "fashion player" Anita Gallo (a falsetto-voiced, sliver-nosed style casualty with oracular pretensions) who "discovered" Versace for America, and weirdo heads of venerable couture houses Alexander McQueen and John Galliano -- spinning a creepy narrative that seems to link the murderer and murderee by some inexorable destiny.

As Joan Juliet Buck, editor of French Vogue, says early on in the film, "Fashion has tremendous power in the absence of any prevailing ideology. Magazines, which are the unlived life, they are the life you're not living but you wish you were living ... They should be called 'longing' magazines." It is a seductive, insidious and destabilizing power capable of transforming a person into a Patsy, an Eddy or an Andrew Cunanan.

The film traces the lives and opposite trajectories of the designer and his killer -- two gay men from humble beginnings with a taste for beauty and lust for the high life -- focusing on the similarities between them and the huge part one's fame and the other's gnawing envy played in the crime. The film demonstrates how Cunanan, with the help of the media, ultimately succeeded in linking his name to Versace's. Cunanan longed to be invited to the party, and once he had outlasted his welcome, became increasingly desperate, put on weight and consumed and sold truckloads of drugs and eventually murdered one of the people most instrumental in creating the post-'60s fantasy world Patsy and Eddy are so desperate to join.

Disconsolately,

Carina

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