Seinfeld
Ch 10, Tuesday
Absolutely Fabulous
ABC-TV, Monday
Reviewed by Dave Riley
Each summer television turns into a graveyard. The dead walk again on the dark side of the daylight hours, risen up from the video vaults in search of another dollar. Such reanimated biographies are marked "Rpt" in the TV guide.
One sparkling exception over the hot months has been Seinfeld, which Channel 10 has packaged with Roseanne on Tuesday nights. Both programs feature skilled comedians who are veterans of the new wave of stand-up sweeping the States. Whereas Roseanne Arnold took her home brewed diva, married it to a family sitcom and then tried to transcend the formula, Jerry Seinfeld goes one better: he discards it.
The comic situation, instead of having its boundaries set by a preordained form of storytelling, is turned into an acted out monologue. To be or not to be Jerry Seinfeld is the question every week.
Not that Jerry has it hard; it is just that his urban existence is so silly. The gags keep coming because they keep coming. Things are funny in themselves. And when you stretch them a bit â follow their absurd logic â you can already hear the distant laughter approaching.
The jokes in Seinfeld are meandering streams rising like bad pennies. Week by week you can "get" the joke again and again. Each time a new layer is added, complicating the absurdity.
You have to go back to the work of Buster Keaton, or that of the French mime Jacques Tati, to find a parallel.
This is fiction, not Candid Camera, so the possibilities are not left to chance. With characters like Seinfeld's neighbour, Kramer, in charge of cigars or opera tickets (in charge of anything!) there is a warped what-if logic to the story; more if you tune in next week.
This program deserves a cult following â well, there's me, anyway â because in its still waters there is soap without suds. Minus the froth, the familiar seems so diabolically strange. We city folk have a lot to put up with.
Did I say "we"? Over at the ABC every Monday night, it gets much worse. In Absolutely Fabulous, the '60s return to haunt us. As you might recall: if you can remember them, you weren't really there.
With wheels on fire rolling down Carnaby Street, Edina (Jennifer Saunders) has dragged her neurotic self into middle age. Fixed and preserved by chemical concoctions of her compulsive indulgence, she is a super trendy PR in the fashion industry.
But her hipness, like punk, is pass to daughter Saffron â portrayed severely by Julia Sawalha â who must survive her mother's egocentric binges. Step back folks, Edina in full flight is over the top. Respite comes only when she plunges into her float tank â to rise very soon after demanding another glass of bubbly.
Written by Jennifer Saunders, Absolutely Fabulous is a self-inflicted joke that pokes fun at the demographic wave of paisley-printed leftovers who cut their cloth and their attitudes at the same seamstress. A bitter satire on the superficiality of the fashion industry and its marauding impulsiveness, Absolutely Fabulous takes the "me" generation to task for turning its indulgences into caricature.
Edina and her long-term friend Patsy â hilariously captured by Joanna Lumley â are walking wounded who wear their campaign medals in the form of ever changing hem lines. Their teacup world is weathered by rages against one's age, figure and wardrobe, interspersed with Patsy's lecherous pursuits.
Carol Burnett once said that comedy was "tragedy plus time". This is true of the lives so intimately portrayed here. Jerry Seinfeld's easygoing self-confidence is a long way from the sardonic pursuits of the distressed sisterhood in Absolutely Fabulous. Jerry, at worst, may be embarrassed sometimes by his comic fortunes. Pickled in trendy mayhem, for all its laughter the world captured in Absolutely Fabulous distorts the lives of the women so complicit in creating it.