PUT YOUR RING ON A DIFFERENT FINGER: So I just read through a bunch of people talking about how television shows never show deep female friendships. And you know, I’m really sympathetic to that criticism. Because real female friendship is “shade and sweet water” to me, and I can’t imagine my own life without it, and I know for sure that it’s marginalized by mainstream representations.

But it did startle me that nowhere in these discussions of women’s friendships on TV did I ever see two words: “Absolutely Fabulous.”

Look–I know it isn’t for everyone. It’s for a certain subset of deeply messed-up, passionate, self-centered and yet simultaneously self-ignoring (they can never acknowledge how much they really need one another) women. But “AbFab” is an amazing representation of two women’s friendship with one another as the fulcrum on which their universe turns. It isn’t always pretty–the rivalry between Saffron and Patsy is brilliantly excruciating (and sickly hilarious!)–but it’s unshakably there. No one could imagine “AbFab” without the central Eternal Couple, Patsy and Edina.

And I should add, by the way: “AbFab” is written by an actual human female, unlike (to take a TV series I watched around the same time as I started watching “AbFab”) Joss I Am A Fake-Ass Feminist Whedon. Pussycat, I am more feminist than Joss Whedon, by a lot–just because I do actually know how women live when men aren’t watching. And I don’t spend all my daggone time trying to prove that women are Just As Good As Men OMG!, because men are really not my standard of value.

I prefer the line from the very first “AbFab” that made me fall in love (she is my Fantasy Girlfriend, despite being quite literally old enough to be my mother) with Patsy Stone: “I’ve known you longer than anybody, Eddie, and I think anything you do is all right! –Can I take the car?”