Get lost, Murphy. TV’s latest over-40 female role model is no Betty Ford graduate. Her career is an afterthought: a support system for her plastic surgeon. She’s a bad girl of a certain age who parties hard, chases young male flesh and doesn’t remember a thing in the morning. The prototype for this new sitcom superwoman is “Absolutely Fabulous,” the scathing British comedy about a pair of aging bimbos in the fashion trade. Comedy Central built “Ab Fab” into such a cult hit last year that Roseanne ponied up for the rights to do an American remake. Meanwhile, on “Cybill,” Christine Baranski has been doing an ab-fab routine of her own as Cybill Shepherd’s boozing buddy, Maryann. Sample scene: at the gym, Cybill struggles furiously with a Nautilus machine while Maryannguzzles martinis out of a water bottle and bitches about her ex-husband, “Dr. Dick.”
If men acted this crass, they’d be run off the air. Gone are the days when the drunk guy was the lazy comedy writer’s easy laugh: Dean Martin hiccuping in his tux, FosterBrooks slurring his way through all those Friar’s Roasts. For the last decade, inebriated males have been scary, movie-of-the-week material. Sitcoms would only go near recovering ones like Sam Malone on “Cheers” or the repentant protagonist of “The John Larroquette Show.” On “NYPD Blue,” Sipowicz has traded his bottle for an AA coffee mug, while a female detective battles the sauce. But CBS entertainment president Les Moonves is convinced that his mostly female Monday-night viewers want to see hard-partying older women behaving as badly as men can: “It’s no accident that ‘High Society’ is on in the time slot where ‘Cybill’ worked a year ago.”
The sobriety police are not amused. They point out that alcohol abuse among young white women 18-29–TV’s demographic sweet spots–is rising. Alyse Booth, of the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, complains that Baranski’s Maryann “drives, but she’s never been in a crash” and “hasn’t even thrown up.” Maybe they’re saving that for the Christmas show.
The hand-wringing seems a tad churlish given how over-the-top these liquid ladies are. (Jean Smart and her costar, Mary McDonnell, ham it up like they’re doing dinner-theater productions of Noel Coward.) They’re only sitcom characters, after all, not First Ladies. “The climate of this country has been so heavy for the last 10 years,” says “High Society” exec producer Robert Horn. “We wanted to let some steam out of the pressure cooker.” Chuck Lorre, who created “Cybill” (but has since decamped), calls Maryann a “joyful drunk.” He’s always loved her type. Before “Cybill,” when he worked on “Grace Under Fire,” he’d wanted to do a trailer-trash version of Maryann who “drank vodka out of a ‘Flintstones’ jelly jar.” ABC nixed the idea. Now they’d probably build a series around her.
