Four More Shots Please! Season 3: The difficult and annoying FMSP girls

At its core, 'Four More Shots Please!' is the ultimate liberal-feminist urban sitcom.

In 2013, a little more than a decade after HBO’s Sopranos resuscitated the old argument that television could do what cinema could do, American culture critic Brett Martin wrote a book called Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire’ to ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad’. The lit boys’ club of powerhouse TV actors and performances, which James Gandolfini led and then died unexpectedly, had done their job by then: Television wasn’t just immediate or intimate, it could facilitate innovative storytelling.  Martin touches upon, almost like an afterthought, the other flagship show from HBO that ran over six hit seasons: Sex and the City, and its own anti-heroes, the four protagonists whose lives are glamorously threatening rather than sad and lonely even at their worst romantic, vulnerable, New York moments. Martin writes, “Its characters were types as familiar as those in ‘The Golden Girls’: the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, the Heroine. But they talked more explicitly, certainly about their bodies, but also about their desires and discontents outside the bedroom, than women on TV ever had before.”

The perception has always been that—and which spills over to the more-is-less decree of the OTT era—mob shows, cop shows, social issue dramas and classic feminist tales of overcoming adversity to thrive are the formulae with more gravitas. Sex and the City was and is guilty pleasure for viewers of all sexual and gender orientations. It’s the assumption that anything stylized, or funny or feminine, or luxuriously consumerist or which celebrates sex for the sake of sex must be inferior.

But the show stuck—it now has a terrible season when the girls are past-50 and living many clichés of the menopausal women. Several countries in the world have obviously found audiences interested enough in Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte to have their own culture-specific iterations or spin-offs of the show. In India, the moment arrived in 2019, when Pritish Nandy Communications’ Four More Shots Please aired on Amazon Prime Video, and went on to have two more seasons. An almost exact replica of Sex And The City, South Mumbai replaces Manhattan, and the four women, Damini Rizvi Roy (Sayani Gupta), a blustering journalist without much density or depth, Anjana Menon (Kirti Kulhari), a lawyer in a mismatched, power-sapping marriage with a man-boy Varun Khanna (Neil Bhoopalam), Umang Singh (VJ Bani), a fitness instructor from small-town Punjab whose fluid sexuality takes her to all kinds of twitchy emotional states, and Siddhi Patel (Maanvi Gagroo), born to wealth and bred to depend on others for every little thing. In the third season, directed by Joyeeta Patpatia and written by Devika Bhagat and Ishita Moitra, the women are heartbroken, mended, re-broken, and forced to swallow many bitter pills about authenticity and healing—buzzwords in the onerous ways in which Gen Z makes meanings out of life—in their relationships and professional demands. But like the other two seasons, although the women are adult-ing a lot more in Season 3, this season too has the same slapdash, largely shallow girl power slant and witticisms that defined the earlier two seasons. The men are abominably “fixed” and un-masculine in the conventional, patriarchal sense; it’s as if these boys are adrift and lost in the vast expanse of masculine expectations that human civilisation has spawned since the beginning of mankind and are a serviceable, politically-correct specie to serve the character arcs and journeys of Damini and her besties.

But FMSP is more; why it continues to be a great binge-watch. It flatters a specific pathology that would warm anybody who is convinced that economic independence and a connection to the world at large have liberated women like never before—that it has been our biggest aphrodisiac. At its core, FMSP is the ultimate liberal-feminist urban sitcom we’ve ever had. Although some of the relationships they endure are akin to slow poisoning, they rescue themselves every time by showing up a wildly self-centred side to them, and by staying true to each of their signatures—Siddhi’s superficiality, Umang’s caustic tongue and sexual boldness, Damini’s refusal to be vulnerable, and Anjana’s unyielding tendency to always do what’s right. When faced with the hard responsibility to herself and her profession, of correcting a casual affair with a close colleague, Anjana meets the said colleague over coffee and offers the best persuasive argument possible under the circumstances; with a straight, steely face, when she says (not verbatim): What do both of us really love? The law, right? The rest are all distractions. We can work together if we remember that.

The show has a realpolitik directness about social pressures women face even in the most privileged and liberal families and workplaces, and that women inherit from their deeply patriarchal upbringings.

Season 3 has some real downers, and several uppers. Love comes in several forms and choice is a matter as much of will as of momentary demands of being alive and curious. Perhaps by Season 4, we will see the real power circuit here: Women who lost themselves in their thirties, changed by impetuous and poisonous love affairs, challenged by dodgy ideas of how a girl should be “good” and finally emerge blissful, surrounded by her besties.