Despite only having 39 episodes (including specials) Absolutely Fabulous is an institution. Over the course of 20 years, Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley have led the faithful through five series of six episodes, 3 specials (running 45-90 minutes each), and a half-series of 20th anniversary specials. How did AbFab become an institution while other shows have come and gone? And, why is it getting a feature-length movie 25 years after the premiere episode? How did we get here?
Before EVERYTHING, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders were a couple of comediennes who met in 1978 at the Central School of Speech and Drama. They worked on comedy projects together, finally appearing together as a comedy duo at The Comic Strip. Over the course of the next decade, they’d cut a comedy record, cohost a radio show, and make their names with the show Girls on Top. Also co-starring Tracey Ullman and Ruby Wax, Girls on Top focused on four female flatmates in an apartment they can only afford because one is an American Trust Fund baby.
Despite being a ratings success, Girls on Top lasted only two series, spinning into two sketch comedy series. Tracey Ullman was written out in Series 2 so she could come to the US and launch The Tracey Ullman Show on Fox (which, eventually had its own spin-off with The Simpsons). Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders would spin off into the beloved French and Saunders, birthplace of Absolutely Fabulous.
French and Saunders started with the usual humble beginnings of the BBC, starting as a variety show on a similar wavelength to The Muppets. They would have elaborate physical comedy stunts, and abuse celebrity guests. Later, as their popularity was cemented, the BBC granted French and Saunders a larger and larger budget with which they could do more and more elaborate spoofs and meta sketches. Since 1987, French and Saunders has lasted 7 separate series, a bunch of specials, and even a handful of radio shows. But, we’re here to talk about one of the sketches from French and Saunders, Modern Mother and Daughter.
Modern Mother and Daughter is a 7-minute idea of a mother and daughter seemingly taking on each other’s roles. Jennifer Saunders is a frizzy-haired, hyper-kinectic, ADD-afflicted mother obsessed with art and high fashion even if it makes her look ridiculous. Dawn French is the rebellious daughter, dressed in the most dour demure outfit and trying to get her homework done in the face of this whirlwind of needy energy that is her mother. While Saunders tries to ply French out of her shell with parties and name brands, French consummately refuses, content with being content in her studious nerdy life. The goal is to play off each other, but they’re obviously grasping at something about aging and rebellion in the modern culture.
Absolutely Fabulous (Series 1-3)
In 1992, Jennifer Saunders took the idea from Modern Mother and Daughter, and fleshed it out into a woman-led series about a selfish PR agent obsessed with youth and fashion living with her bookish teenage daughter. Edina Monsoon somehow runs a PR agency in between her busy life of shopping, doing lunch, and partying all night. She’s introduced in the series as waking up late for work while hungover and trying to hide the cigarettes and bottles of wine from her daughter, Saffron (Julia Sawahal) who has come in to push her out for the day. Eddy and Saffy are the type where Eddy tries to make Saffy call her in sick for work and Saffy instead rats her out. Eddy is the type of person who will cancel all of her meetings in order to go shopping and do lunch with with best gal pal Patsy (Joanna Lumley), even at the expense of her impending fashion show happening that night.
Patsy and Eddy aren’t exactly role models. They’re the type of women who are able to (over)indulge in bad behavior that is usually the exclusive realm of men. They drink too much, they smoke too much, Patsy seduces any good looking man younger than her, Eddy has multiple marriages and multiple kids, one of whom has left home. American counterparts would have them succeed at every turn, but almost every episode ends with some sort of outburst, shockingly hilarious ironic twist, or just a completely bad ending. Patsy and Eddy, in the original three series, are very much not role models nor were they ever meant to be. They inflict themselves on Eddy’s family (including her mother, Gran, who makes frequent drop ins despite not living in the house), and are horror shows of people.
And, yet, they’re human. Eddy is a selfish Boomer who can’t give up her swinging sixties youth. She clings so desperately to fashion as her expression of taste that she has little of her own beyond the visual. In the very first episode, she puts on a nightmare outfit, best described as vomit after drinking too many screwdrivers and Cape Codders, that offends everybody until they realize it is a Lacroix (a couture design house) at which point it is decreed as fabulous. This parade of fashion monstrosity doesn’t stop from frame one, leaving Eddy to have less fashion sense than her daughter who dresses to hide in the shadows. Yet, we recognize the obsession with living a life as loud and fast as possible. We see her insecurities about her weight in ourselves. She is all of us trying to climb a very superficial social ladder.
Through the first three series, Eddy also isn’t the height of success. She lives in a modest house in a neighborhood that has only built up around her. With two stories and a basement, the house is made up to look like any number of middle-class houses with modest furniture and accoutrements. She’s clearly making ends meet – Patsy and Edina go vacation in Morocco and Provence, France – but, it’s not a rich expensive lifestyle.
To counterpoint Patsy and Edina, Saffron takes on the role of the judgmental audience surrogate. The audience can indulge in Patsy and Edina’s flighty excesses because we’re grounded by Saffron’s intellectual finger wagging. Yet, Saffron isn’t always in the right and frequently gets mowed over by her mother. Despite resistance, Edina frequently attempts to become involved in Saffron’s life…only to humiliate everybody in the end. Edina petulantly tries to adopt a Romanian baby, a selection of which are delivered in the middle of Saffron’s school presentation while Patsy is making out with an old flame who is now the school principal.
Series 3 of AbFab ends with an episode titled “The End,” pointing to a life of old age and lifelong friendship. Everybody breaks apart in the preceding episode – Patsy is invited to work in New York, Eddy loses everything and sets out to find herself, and Saffy is living in college housing – but they come back together, doomed to live a life of friendship and animosity. A flash forward points to a life 25 years later with Patsy and Eddy still living in old age with Saffy.
By the time Series 3 was airing in Britain, a then-still-fledgling Comedy Central had picked up Absolutely Fabulous as a flagship series. Despite only having 18 half-hour episodes, Comedy Central would run them back to back every week, running through the cycle over and over and over again. AbFab was ratings gold for them, finding an unusual show with a diehard audience. At the time, female comediennes were landing television shows left and right. In the 1994-1995 season, ABC had Roseanne, Ellen, All American Girl, and Grace Under Fire. CBS had Murphy Brown, Daddy’s Girls, The Women of the House, The Nanny and Cybill. NBC had Hope and Gloria, The Mommies, and Blossom. Fox had Living Single and a bunch of female-led dramas like Melrose Place, Party of Five, Models, Inc., and Beverly Hills, 90210. And that was just the major networks.
AbFab felt like an acid wash take on all of these, closest to the recently departed The Golden Girls but darker and drier. In most of the above shows, women weren’t allowed to act badly on purpose. Sure, Roseanne and Grace Under Fire were built around salty women, but they had hearts of gold. AbFab was about women who were cruel to each other, poking and prodding at each other’s foibles and at the foibles of the upper class. In the Series 2 episode Poor, Edina is put on a money diet and has to learn how to drive and do her own shopping, ending up with $35k in fines and Patsy getting charged with shoplifting for stealing champagne. None of the above shows would allow their lead characters to be so flawed. This type of misbehavior had an audience, and they found it on Comedy Central.
Absolutely Fabulous (everything else)
Because American audiences were catching up with AbFab just as it was ending the first time, Comedy Central helped finance a special two-part send-off, The Last Shout. Initially deemed to be the last episodes ever, The Last Shout starts a sea change. Things start to become less grounded in reality. Eddy is keeping a dolphin in her pool. Her ex-husband Marshall is re-united, without explanation, with his ex-wife Bo. We last saw Bo getting married to a publishing magnate just as he died, while Marshall was drinking in a hot tub with an escort. Gran finds a couple of old people friends who park their RV outside Eddy’s house to connect to air conditioning, cable, and electricity. And, Saffy is set on getting married to a rich Italian control freak preying on her deep insecurities of not being enough to please anybody.
In Series 1-3, we saw how everybody fit and interconnected in an absurdist dark way, but in The Last Shout, everything curdled. Without warning or reason, everybody was sniping at everybody else without regard for feelings or even purpose. Patsy, Eddy, and Saffy are all at each other’s throats almost immediately as they set foot in the kitchen. Though Patsy cares for Saffy, they show it through holding as much animosity toward each other as possible. What was an undercurrent that got exposed in the beginning is now a raw cord that runs through. It’s almost as if Jennifer Saunders was uncomfortable with the fan base idolization of her characters and was dead set on making them as cruel as possible.
This change in tone continues into Series 4, made a full five years after The Last Shout. Still co-produced by Comedy Central, Series 4 possesses a cruelty that’s still above and beyond Series 1-3. Some sample storylines include Edina going to a fat camp, Edina tricking Saffy into posing topless on the cover of a magazine, Saffy putting on a dramatic recreation of AbFab‘s greatest moments as a Russian drama (without changing the dialogue), and Edina losing her business. Despite her failures, Edina is failing upwards with a bigger kitchen, bigger sets, and even a wider frame. All this culminates in the Christmas Special which attempts to careen us back to the AbFab we know and love. Titled Gay, Edina finds out that her long lost son, Serge, is gay and living in New York. Coinciding with that revelation, Patsy is going to New York Fashion Week for her magazine. Series 4 also brings in a change of focus towards having celebrity cameos playing themselves including Twiggy and Christian Lacroix.
Series 5, now co-produced with Oh! Oxygen, has an even bigger kitchen and way more celebrity cameos. Though no less cruel towards Patsy and Eddy, Series 5 brings you more into their world. They’re no longer complete objects of warning, but endearing anti-heroes you can’t help but root for. Saunders still knows that she is poking fun at upper class life in all its shallowness, but Patsy and Eddy are so much a part of her, they’re now almost heroes. This even gets further exploited in White Box and the 20th anniversary specials.
By the end of the television series, Patsy and Edina have taken up a position halfway between glorification and ridicule. Though we laugh at their ridiculousness, we’re also meant to identify with their foils and their shallowness. Increasingly, we’re meant to see our own bad behaviors in Patsy and Edina, and their greed. The cruelty is an attempt to keep the audience from identifying too solidly, but there’s still a touch of winking acceptance to their naughtiness that wasn’t in the first few series.
What makes AbFab truly special is just how much this is a show without men. Now and then a man will have a guest appearance for an episode or two (recurring guest appearances happen by series), but the men are delegated to the background at most. This is a woman’s world almost everywhere you look. And, when there is a man, chances are that man is gay (exception: Edina’s ex-husband, Marshall). All of the main characters are women, most of their recurring coworkers are women, and most people they deal with are women. It’s a show created by women, produced by a woman, and written by a woman about a family of women. That it’s also a naughty dark satire of our modern culture, with special focuses on celebrity, fashion, and appearance should not escape anybody. When it’s not about the look of things, its about family, as Saffy is studying DNA throughout the first three series. The women are brutally funny, and amazing at physical comedy to accent their verbal riffing.
Patsy and Edina may be us at our worst, even though they’re trying their best, but they’re always a pleasure to indulge in. After 20 years of programming, that’s a lot.