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Jack Barnes/BBC America & LogoAbsolutely Fabulous 20th Anniversary SpecialsJoanna Lumley, left, and Jennifer Saunders are back as Pats and Eddy on BBC America and Logo on Sunday night at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.

Jennifer Saunders, left, and Joanna Lumley return as the older but still heedless hedonists Eddy and Pats in a series of 20th anniversary Absolutely Fabulous specials.

In the first episode, above from left, are Ms. Saunders, Jane Horrocks, Julia Sawalha, Ms. Lumley and Christopher Malcolm.

And not just hedge-fund managers and Wall Street traders. All big spenders look suspect these days. A California advocacy group is agitating for a state tax on millionaires by painting Kim Kardashian as a reality-show Marie Antoinette. Being on TV has changed my life, Ms. Kardashian says on a rabble-rousing video attaxkimk.com. Because you get lots of free stuff.

Even nonreality shows feed class ware. Two Broke Girls, a CBS sitcom about two down-on-their luck waitresses, is a hit. Socialites and plutocrats in the Hamptons are the object of scorn and worse in the post-credit-collapse nighttime soap Revenge.

So it’s hard to see how two heedless, Champagne-slurping hedonists who rode the greed-fueled excesses of Thatcher-Blair prosperity can find an audience 20 years later, in the middle of a worldwide economic slump, unemployment and towering government debt.

It’s a relief to report that Jennifer Saunders andJoanna Lumley, a k a Edina and Patsy, the middle-aged, spendthrift s of Absolutely Fabulous, are back in the first of three 20th-anniversary specials on BBC America beginning on Sunday — unchanged and still quite funny. It turns out that the duo’s particular brand of substance abuse, self-absorption and high-end shopping is recessionproof.

Eddy and Pats, as they call each other,were deliciously bad in good times; in times of trouble they are still a tonic — with gin and a twist. And older.

I grieve for the menopause, Eddy (Ms. Saunders) says. I don’t have any hormones, darling. I’m just held together with gels, pills and suppositories.

The show, which was cKim Kardashianreated by Ms. Saunders in 1992, showcased Eddy as a hard-partying London public-relations diva with a reproving, bookish teenage daughter, Saffron (Julia Sawalha). Eddy routinely mocked and neglected Saffy and instead went clubbing with Pats, a tall, thin and lugubrious shion-magazine editor whose capacity for no food and lots of drugs and drink made Keith Richards look abstemious.

Jokes about menopause, drinking, drugs, , cosmetic surgery and t are all over television nowadays, so it’s hard to remember that when Absolutely Fabulous first suced on American television in 1994, it was an era when only Roseanne Barr dared be quite so crass, and she played a more sympathetic role of working-class wife and mother.

Absolutely Fabulous was in its way groundbreaking, yet it also harked back to an earlier era of television comedy. Some of the most memorable sitcoms of all time revolve around a pair of daffy dames.

Lucy and Ethel rise above all others, but Mary and Rhoda found their niche in the 1970s, replacing housework and marital scheming with the single woman’s preoccupation with feminism, careers and dating. In the 1980sKate and Allietapped into another stage of the women’s movement, finding humor in the lives of divorced working moms.

Eddy and Pats came next, and they introduced the world of earned, but undeserved wealth, satirizing the materialism and cult of celebrity ushered in by the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. That was a me decade that lasted almost three, and Absolutely Fabulous spanned most of it: the series had only three seasons, but the duo kept coming back in mini-series and specials.

They were often imitated, but especially on American television writers were not as daring. British comedy is notoriously callous, with an unyielding ban on sentimentality or political correctness.

Ms. Lumley in particular created an archetype that has often been copied, without going quite as r. Christine Baranski was very funny — but not nearly as outrageous — as a martini-swilling best friend to Cybill Shepherd on Cybill. It’s hard to imagine that Karen Walker, the ditsy, dipsy best friend played by Megan Mullally on Will & Grace, could have found so welcoming an audience without Patsy as a model.

Most of all, the show’s setting, a prescient send-up of Cool Britannia shion, publicity and celebrity promotions, opened the way for Sex and the City.

The world has changed, but Eddy and Pats are still living in a soggy Champagne-and-pills hangover, aging has-beens struggling to stay on top, even though they were never really that close to it in their heyday. They still live decadently, and Eddy has held on to her posh town house but seems as needy and desperate as ever, instructing her assistant to update her Web site: Blog and flog, she trills.

Weight is still a preoccupation.

I’m at a time in my life, darling, when every t cell I ever lost or gained has come back for the t-cell reunion of the year, Eddy moans.

The show mentions the credit crunch as an acknowledgment of a changed economy, but in the same old spirit of political incorrectness. Saffy, who is now an adult but still ious, bemoans the London riots of 2011, which brought on arson and looting. Patsy isn’t convinced.

Oh, I don’t know, she says with her trademark sneer. Nothing wrong with a bit of extreme shopping.

Twenty years ago the s of Absolutely Fabulous were wacky heralds of a new age of extravagance. Now they are the last blinkered women in the bunker, hoarding designer shoes and awaiting an Evite back to the glamorous life. They don’t belong there, and that’s what makes them so welcome.

ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS 20TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIALS

BBC America and Logo, Sunday night at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.

Produced for the BBC by Saunders & French, BBC America and Logo. Written by Jennifer Saunders; Jon Plowman, executive producer; Justin Davies, producer.

WITH: Jennifer Saunders (Edina Monsoon), Joanna Lumley (Patsy Stone), Julia Sawalha (Saffron Monsoon), June Whitfield (Mother) and Jane Horrocks (Bubble).

Correction: January 6, 2012

An earlier version of this review misidentified the area of London where Eddy has her town house. It is Holland Park, not the nearby Notting Hill.

A version of this review appeared in print on January 6, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Still Hung Over From the 90s.

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