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The 2 Best Sitcoms of the 1990s
I have been rewatching Absolutely Fabulous, and was actually surprised that a show I once thought was very ghey is actually, to use modern terminology, based. AbFab wasn’t celebrating a decadent, hedonistic lifestyle, it was ridiculing it. And as I thought about it some more, AbFab has a lot in common with the other great sitcom of the 1990s, Frasier.
On the surface, the shows don’t seem very much alike, but in addition to being stunningly well-written and flawlessly cast, both of these are ‘comedies of manners.‘ AbFab chose the object of its humor to be the excesses of high fashion and celebrity (but was definitely not above slapstick), while Frasier went after pretentious intellectualism and psychology. But the two shows actually had quite a bit more in common beneath the surface.
In both series, the main characters chased affirmation and validation from their respective societies. Frasier chased awards and accolades that recognized and paid tribute to his intellect. Edina Monsoon chased after every pop-culture trend in a desperate attempt to raise her social status (“a mixed-race baby is the best fashion accessory a woman in my position could have!“), whether it was buying hundreds of thousands of dollars in modern art, or being unsure if she liked the earrings her daughter had birthday-gifted her without knowing for sure if they were designer. “Do you like them?” “I like them if they’re Lacroix.” One episode of Frasier centered on Niles and Frasier’s jealousy that their plumber drove a larger Mercedes. The main characters never caught on that they were the butt of the jokes.
Both shows featured a sibling pair as the main characters. Niles and Frasier Crane were brothers, and Edina and Patsy were sisters in all but the biological sense. And just as Niles represented Frasier’s effete intellectualism in its most concentrated form, Patsy was a model of excess that Edina envied but could never fully indulge.
Both shows set their main characters’ pursuit of status against a family dynamic. Martin Crane was the grounded father of the Crane clan, while daughter Saffron Monsoon tried in vain to keep her mother grounded. Niles and Frasier both had dysfunctional ex-wives, while Edina had her homosexual ex-husband Justin and another ex-husband, Marshall, whose new love was more of a nurse/mother than a partner. Frasier had super-competent, highly promiscuous producer Roz; Patsy had promiscuous, Type-A magazine editor Magda. I guess there’s some kind of analogy for eccentric Daphne and air-headed personal assistant Bubble, as well.
Both shows had an off-screen family member whose effect on the main characters was a source of humor but was never seen on-screen. On Frasier, this was Niles’s “not-quite-human-woman” wife Maris. On AbFab, this was Edina’s estranged son Serge, who was so desperate to escape his mother’s dysfunction that he ended up on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in a submarine doing research on the mid-Atlantic rift. No actor or actress could have lived up to the Maris or Serge of the audience’s imagination, and the producers were wise not to try.
All right, a couple of choice samples of each grabbed from YouTube. Intellectually, AbFab was Id, Frasier was Superego.
Both shows wear well 30 years on compared with most of their contemporaries. Extra credit to Frasier for being the rare successor sitcom that vastly exceeded the show it spun off from. Most of them end up as AfterMASH or Joey.
Published in Entertainment
Try watching an old sitcom without the laugh track. It is enlightening.
“vastly exceeded”? Please. Frasier was good, but Cheers was better.
All right, controversy. Love it. Now, all we need to do to get this thread going is somehow bring Donald Trump into the mix.
Ha! Done!
A favorite Ab Fab scene, from the “Morocco” episode:
The utter boredom on Patsy’s face as she replies gets me every time.
I love the scene later where she tries to eat a potato chip. It has, I think, a counterpart gag on Frasier where Niles and Frasier go to their dad’s favorite restaurant, but it’s not gourmet food so they have to force themselves to eat it.
There’s another line that I think is quintessential Frasier: “Think of it this way, Niles: what is the one thing better than an exquisite meal? An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night.“
One of my favorite lines from Frasier is by Niles: “ I really must be going. My multiple personality group is meeting this evening and it takes forever to fill out the name tags.”
Frasier is magnificent. I’ve never seen AbFab but am now interested in checking it out.
@miffedwhitemale, a few years ago I would have agreed with you. But recently I tried rewatching Cheers and although the characters are superb and the dialogue is top-notch, Sam’s horniness and relentless skirt-chasing get to be too much. I gave up after a couple of seasons.
Cheers was great, but Frasier was next level.
The Frasier character holds a record for most seasons in primetime (excluding animated series).
I haven’t seen Frasier, but I’d put Yes, Minster/Yes, Prime Minister in combination with AbFab as the two best . . .
My word…the “The Timber Mill” episode. My brother and I looked at each other when that episode aired and …one of us said, “It’s us with dad at that place in Rockville”. Not kidding.
The “Dad’s Chair” episode is a perfect and moving TV comedy.
Yes. And the rapport between Grammer and Hyde-Pierce and the two of them and John Mahoney made it so as much as the dialogue, I think.
I loved them both, but preferred Frasier.
I think it was a recurring gag that Patsy lived on booze, cigarettes, and cocaine. She never consumed actual food.
I usually avoid sitcoms and have never seen Frazier. When I was in England AbFab was on and I saw it a few times. Much more recently I did watch AbFab the Movie (2016) and I was completely won over.
The movie is a hilarious spoof of celebrity culture and features many celebrity cameos. There is no laugh track – Yay! I do enjoy a good farce occasionally and this movie delivers. Highly recommended.
I’ll just point out that Cheers did the same thing, with Norm’s wife Vera. [Thanksgiving episode after getting pie in the face excepted.]
AbFab got me started on Stoli.
So I could be the guy that says “What about Seinfeld“?
But I wouldn’t do that because it would bring out the inexplicable anti-Seinfeld folks.
No soup for you!
You are correct about the running gag involving Patsy. Whereas poor Eddie struggled constantly with her weight.
Frasier and Niles were a proxy gay couple.
Now do The Odd Couple.
Try again: News Radio and Sports Night.
I think we have a Ricochet Movie(er, TV Show) Debate coming on….
Best sitcom of the 90’s!
Sorry, kids, but that’s my jam. And your high-brow oldies TV doesn’t cut it.
Martin
Living Single
Fresh Prince
Back in the hey-day of post-racial America, when white people were able to watch TV shows with black people and enjoy them and actually ponder some of the racial questions without being made to feel like crap constantly. Man. What a time to be alive that was!
News radio was just fine, but its real legacy is Joe Rogan.
Come now. We could go on for pages about Jimmy James alone.
[Enter Norm]
Patrons: NORM!
Diane: Norman.
Woody: What are You up to, Norm?
Norman: My idea weight… if I were eleven foot five.
[Norm and Clifford sitting at the bar. Clifford reading a tabloid]
Clifford: Ay, Normy… lookey here, “Suicidal twin kills brother by mistake.”
Married… With Children would be in my top five or six, but Frasier/AbFab still the best.
Best of the early 2000s? Malcolm in the Middle. No contest. Even though Frankie Muniz remembers none of it because of a traumatic brain injury.
Fact check: True
Some shows don’t do as well from short-term binge watching.
Apologies to anyone who requires it, but this is necessary: