Ab Fab is built around Patsy and Eddie’s relationship to each other and to the other women in their lives, mainly Eddie’s uptight, down-to-earth daughter Saffron (Julia Sawhalla) and Eddie’s mother, June Monsoon (June Whitfield). When men do appear on the show, they’re presented in a very limited capacity — as gay hairstylists, Eddie’s ex-husbands, Patsy’s conquests.

Like the women on Sex and the City, Patsy and Eddie behave badly and get away with it. They joke about things like abortion, have guilt-free one-night stands, and even attempt to have orgies. They are foolish and politically incorrect, campy and feminist in their own way.

In the late “90s, the show had its American imitators — the final season of Roseanne (the lottery fantasia), for example, even featured Saunders and Lumley as guest stars. Cybill Sheperd’s eponymous Cybill had all the parts: the mother-daughter team, the drinking best friend, the ex-husband floating in and out of the picture, and a TV-breakthrough moment when Cybill and her best friend Maryann talked about masturbation. Still, it lacked Ab Fab’s manic spirit.

So when Ab Fab returned to Comedy Central in the fall, viewers got what they had come to expect from Patsy and Edina: Patsy got hooked on self-injected doses “Parralox,” a Botox-like anti-wrinkle treatment, and turned feminine-maternal from taking too much estrogen to combat menopause; Eddie got laid, tried to lose weight, and, in a couple of episodes, became further estranged from her daughter.

All of these moments fit into the Ab Fab formula perfectly — too perfectly, in fact. When Eddie embarrassed and neglected her teenage daughter, Saffron (Saffy), during the first five seasons, Saffy always responded with a mix of frustration and resilience. We expected that once she grew up she’d move out of the house and get her own life. Instead, Saffy is even more frustrated than before, but also desperate to leave in a way that now feels bitter rather than comic. While Saffy’s anger about her upbringing makes for some of the season’s best comic moments — especially in the form of a tell-all autobiographical play, “Self-Grown Flower” — it’s hard to find her broken spirit all that funny.

Even when Eddie and Saffy enjoyed a burst of mother-daughter bonding on a trip to Paris (during which Eddie discovered her daughter is fluent in French and Saffy gave up her tourist agenda for shopping and fine dining), the episode was really about Eddie’s scheme to get Saffy to bare her breasts from the Eiffel Tower, a moment that was photographed for a fashion magazine spread. The show didn’t end with Saffy feeling good about the published photo, or with her taking legal action against her mother and the magazine, but instead with her closing the door on Eddie and sobbing. 

We clearly understand her frustration. While the world around them has changed, Patsy and Eddie remain static, and their lack of growth is, at times, tragic. When I tuned into the new season of Ab Fab, I was initially delighted to see Patsy and Eddie deal humorously with aging, to watch Eddie bed a younger man, and to see Patsy portrayed by a drag queen in Saffy’s play. But it didn’t feel as funny or as interesting as it had the first time around.

The women of Sex and the City HBO

Part of the difference may have a lot to do with a change in TV-land. In 1998, three years after the Ab Fab cast and crew stopped producing new episodes, HBO launched Sex and the City. Now in its fourth season, Sex and the City (SATC), though no Ab Fab imitation, is similar to the British series in that it features a core cast of female characters: sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), prince-charming seeking Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), career woman Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), and commitment-phobic PR agent Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall). These women have access to fabulous lives in New York City, complete with well-paying careers, great apartments and the disposable income to dine and shop where they please. They’re players in an upwardly-mobile urban mating game.

Where Patsy and Edina’s representation of this good life is ultimately satirical, this sort of life is something the SATC women have achieved, though not without struggle. Carrie’s pursuit has involved her search for a compatible life partner and the answer to the question: What do women want?; for Samantha, it’s been about having fun, new experiences and exciting sexual conquests; Miranda sacrificed relationships to maintain her independence; and Charlotte was all-too-willing to forgo independence in place of a well-to-do husband and, hopefully, a baby.

In recent years, the show has been praised for its representation of women’s friendships with each other, as well as its sexual frankness and comic value. Just last week, SATC took home the Golden Globe award for best television series (musical/comedy), and Parker won best performance by an actress in a television series (musical/comedy).

For the most part, I agree with the praise bestowed upon it by critics and the show’s fans, and I admire the show’s interest in depicting multiple representations of women. My largest reservation with SATC had been that its characters seemed destined to stay on certain paths, right up to the point at which the show went on hiatus in the summer of 2001. It’s been fun to watch Samantha exercise her prerogative to sleep around, without repercussion, but after awhile, those sexual adventures start to seem repetitive (and I worried one day Sam might run out of eligible men to bed).

As the SATC women were in the process of making what seemed like a whole slew of bad decisions, or at least decisions that would have serious, complicated consequences, I feared the worse. So when the show returned to HBO this month, I had low expectations. But after watching the first few episodes, I realized where Ab Fab had failed this time around. By allowing its characters to evolve, SATC proved that growth and change can be funny and interesting, and that the risks involved with taking the SATC women into new territory are smart ones.

So far this season, the tables have turned. Charlotte’s attainment of (literally) the picture-perfect life (she poses with her husband for a magazine cover), has crumbled, and now she’ll move on. Unable to handle breaking down walls to build a bigger apartment with her fiance, Aidan (John Corbett), Carrie questions whether being engaged is really what she wants. Samantha deals with her current beau’s interest in more than sex, and has one of her most romantic moments of the series: She dances with him on a rooftop, the city laid out below. And Miranda “fakes’ excitement upon learning her baby’s sex through a sonogram — and learns that the joy of motherhood is not always innate.

These turns in the narrative are what make SATC about more than the fabulousness of Carrie’s Manolos or her ability to get into the right restaurants. While Patsy and Edina joke about wanting to be like the SATC girls — their younger, more moderate, but already-arrived and entitled foils — I’m hoping that, in some ways, their wish comes true. Then we could watch Patsy go through menopause and come out still-fabulous but different, or see Saffy learn about the Hitachi Magic Wand and access her own sexual persona, or watch Eddie actually become one of the Beautiful People and corrupt them from within.

What Ab Fab’s creative team could acknowledge (and what SATC’s seems to already know) is that its viewers are resilient; we take risks, make mistakes, screw things up, and hopefully come away from it all stronger and wiser. And we’d like to see that happen to the characters we love, too.

Enter the Pop Forum
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Alana Kumbier, television editor for PopPolitics, is a writer who lives in Columbus, Ohio. Her previous articles can be found here.

Related Sites
Here are the official sites for Absolutely Fabulous (UK) (and its production team, French & Saunders) and Sex and the City.
Writer Francine Prose stirred up discussion over her article on women’s entertainment, A Wasteland of One’s Own, that was published in the New York Times Magazine. "From Oxygen.com to Providence, the entertainment industry is finally creating culture that’s ‘for women, by women.’ But is this the drivel we’ve been waiting for?"
From the Museum of Broadcast Communications, here’s an article by Mary Desjardins that looks at the history of gender roles on television.