CAROUSING WOMEN

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Never far from a bottle of Stolichnaya or a discounted Vivienne Westwood frock, Edina and Patsy are without sitcom ancestry. They aren't scatterbrained housewives or ambitious careerists or sassy working-class women struggling to make ends meet. They're single, well-to-do best friends of unadmitted age, who drug, carouse and couture-shop their way through life. Hardly ever do they tend to the pseudo-glam, fashion-world jobs they inexplicably manage to keep.

Well-intentioned and likable they are not. And yet the selfish, slothful heroines of the hit British TV show Absolutely Fabulous have attracted a cult of admirers worldwide. Produced for the BBC in 1993, the comedy has been exported to nearly 20 countries, including Israel and Japan. When the show aired on Comedy Central last July, its ratings were twice as high as anything the cable channel had run in prime time. The first 12 episodes have been in continual rerun ever since.

Next Monday, Comedy Central will begin broadcasting the final six of the show's 18 episodes for the first time in the U.S., which is likely to fan the AbFab fanaticism that's taking hold. Last month Pocket Books issued a compilation of AbFab teleplays. Jennifer Saunders, the show's creator, writer and co-star (as Edina), is writing a movie version of the comedy. In the meantime, Roseanne, who bought the American rights to the show because she thinks "every line of it is brilliant," has spent the past few weeks trying to persuade ABC executives that network audiences will love the AbFab she is producing.

Remaking the show for a mainstream American viewership will be a challenge. Absolutely Fabulous is so appealing because it is as trenchantly sophisticated as it is hilariously base; American sitcoms are rarely allowed to be either. Edina and her pal Patsy, played by former James Bond vixen Joanna Lumley, make endless media references to people like New Yorker editor Tina Brown, legendary Vogue fashion director Grace Coddington and satirist Will Self, whom Edina hires in one of the final shows to write an acceptance speech for a public-relations award she has little chance of receiving.

The last half a dozen episodes have the ladies reaching a crescendo of tastelessness. They fire off jokes about masturbation, bulimia and the crisis in Grozny. In one episode, Edina and Patsy tart themselves up for the arrival of two male prostitutes. When Edina is worried that her tight dress will make her seem like "a pushover," Patsy responds, "Darling, you're paying him. In his eyes you're already flat on your back and staked out."

Initially AbFab was a tough sell even to the famously open-minded BBC. Producer Jon Plowman recalls a BBC development executive viewing the show and remarking, "I don't think women being drunk is funny." According to Plowman, AbFab made it on the air thanks to the ardent support of a secretary to the BBC's head of entertainment. She enjoyed the show and taped it for all her friends, who quickly became fans. It emboldened the network to take the risk.

Now American TV executives are at the same threshold. With help from Saunders and AbFab script editor Ruby Wax, Roseanne has reworked the teleplay for her pilot episode three times in an effort to appease ABC bosses. "The first script I turned in was almost exactly what they would have done at the BBC," she says. But the network executives balked at the drug and alcohol references. Edina and Patsy, who may be played in the American version by Carrie Fisher and Barbara Carrera, "won't be swilling Bollinger and vodka," says Roseanne, "but we will imply it."

Although Roseanne is confident that ABC will pick up her AbFab, the comedian has been frustrated with the development process. "It's a groundbreaking show for this country, and it is difficult for the network to see what the show is. We just got hip enough to watch Seinfeld and see unmarried people having sex. This show isn't going to be Growing Pains or Cybill," she says, referring to the AbFab-influenced, modestly rated Cybill Shepherd sitcom in which the main character has a boozy, brassy best friend.

But how daringly Roseanne's version will veer from Cybill, or another failed AbFab knockoff called High Society, remains to be seen. Even if the wry, raunchy cocktail is watered down, the original Edina and Patsy will still be lurking somewhere in the cable universe, with plenty of fans to toast them.