Ab Fab, as fans call it, is about idle-rich Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders), a 40-ish spoiled brat who owns her own PR business but works at it only rarely (and incompetently). Stuck in the self-indulgences of the 1960s but showing no sign of that decade’s political awareness, Edina refuses to grow up. Her principal talent is making a spectacle of herself. This she achieves by dressing gaudily, speaking loudly and rudely, and lurching frantically from one exaggerated crisis to the next. All the while, she overindulges—in smoking, drinking, drugs, shopping, and fads (Buddhism, colonic irrigation, various unsuccessful attempts at slimming down). She lives extravagantly off the alimony provided by two ex-husbands.

Edina’s best friend, Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), is equally a caricature. Employed as “fashion director” of a trendy magazine, she almost never works (she has the job because she slept with the publisher). She is even more of a substance abuser than Edina and trashier in appearance with an absurdly tall, blond hairdo and far too much lipstick. Most disturbingly, Patsy is overly dependent upon Edina for money, transportation, and especially companionship.

Patsy often behaves like an unruly daughter, thereby displacing Edina’s real daughter, Saffron (Julia Sawalha), of whom Patsy is extremely jealous. Edina humors Patsy’s excesses and seems parental only by virtue of her money and domineering personality. The real “mother” of the house is Saffron, a young adult who, in being almost irritatingly virtuous, is both a moral counterweight to Patsy and a comic foil for the two childlike adults.

Thus, Saffron represents conscience and serves a function similar to that of Meathead in All in the Family, except that in Ab Fab the generational conflict is not one of conservative versus liberal so much as bad versus good liberalism. Neither Saffron nor Edina is conservative. Although Saffron is somewhat nerdy in the manner of Alex Keaton of Family Ties, she lacks his predatory materialism and serves as a reassuring model of youth. While Patsy and Edina illustrate a pathological mutation of 1960s youth culture, Saffron provides hope that liberalism (or at least youth) is redeemable.

Ab Fab’s focus on generational issues also plays out in Edina’s disrespect for her mother (June Whitfield). The relationships among the four female main characters are all the more interesting because of the absence of men. Edina’s father puts in only two appearances in the series (most noticeably as a corpse), and only Saffron cares that he has died. Similarly, Edina’s son is never seen in the first 12 episodes and is only mentioned a few times. It is not that men are bad; rather, they are irrelevant.

This allows Ab Fab to have a feminist flavor even as it portrays women in mostly unflattering terms. Edina and Patsy are certainly not intended as role models, and in presenting them as buffoonish and often despicable, series creator-writer Saunders ridicules not only bourgeois notions of motherhood and family life but also media images of women’s liberation. For example, Edina and Patsy, although “working women,” actually depend upon the largesse of men to maintain their station in life. This cynical vision of professionalism may seem regressive, but at the same time, it is a refreshing critique of advertising and fashion, two industries invariably depicted by TV as “absolutely fabulous.”

Ab Fab developed from a sketch on the French and Saunders show and is a fine example of the flowering of Alternative Comedy, the post-Monty Python movement that also produced The Young Ones. Rejecting what Roger Wilmut and Peter Rosengard have called the “erudite middle-class approach” of the Python generation, the new British comics of the 1980s approached their material with a rude, working-class, rock-and-roll sensibility (see Wilmut and Rosengard). Ab Fab, while focusing on the concerns of middle age, nonetheless has a youthful energy and eschews sentimentality. Flashbacks and dream sequences contribute to this energy and give the show a mildly anarchic structure.

A smash hit in Britain, Ab Fab won two International Emmy Awards and gave the somewhat obscure Comedy Central channel a significant publicity boost. Camp elements of the series were especially appreciated by gay viewers, among whom the Edina and Patsy characters achieved icon status. Comedian Roseanne began developing an American adaptation of Ab Fab in 1995 but was unable to find a network willing to air it. Meanwhile, Saunders kept the franchise alive by producing a half-hour mock documentary, How to Be Absolutely Fabulous (1995), and a reunion movie, Absolutely Fabulous: The Last Shout (1996). Six new episodes of the sitcom aired on the BBC in 2001 and debuted on Comedy Central in November of that year.

The success of Ab Fab and other mid-1990s series such as Politically Incorrect has encouraged Comedy Central to venture even further in the direction of topicality and taboo breaking. For the cable channel, this programming strategy has resulted in additional success (South Park) as well as the occasional failure (That’s My Bush!).