Absolutely Fabulous: The Complete Series 5 (review)

We’ll always have the idiocies of fashion, celebrity, and pop culture, and one has to hope that we’ll always have AbFab to puncture them. After an absence of a few years from the airwaves, Patsy and Edina are back and as wickedly funny as they’ve ever been, stumbling drunkenly through days full of aversion to work — Patsy is ostensibly a fashion stylist, Eddie is ostensibly… something indefinably hip — and an endless striving to be more au courant than thou, from riding around in a Hummer limo to stocking the panic room with champagne. And when Eddie’s daughter, Saffy, turns up pregnant, it’s just an excuse to turn the baby into the ultimate accessory. Jennifer Saunders (as Eddie) and Joanna Lumley (as Patsy) are still gleefully cruel in their outrageous caricatures of the world’s worst fashion victims, and Saunders’s scripts are universes of bitter wit in which absolutely nothing is sacred: not Christmas, certainly not the “war on terror.” The discs include eight new episodes featuring bonus footage not aired in the U.S. (where they aired on the Oxygen cable network).