Despite its scattered pleasures, the final season of the series, touted to be Indian version of Sex and the City and Girls, delivers tidy resolutions, minimal tension, and dated portrayals of friendship and desire
Four More Shots Please! returns for its fourth and final season the way it always has: mid-chaos, mid-confession, and mid-freakout. The opening image is telling. There is a wedding underway, and right at its centre is Siddhi Patel (Maanvi Gagroo), spiralling. She is high on brownies, overwhelmed by commitment, and quietly devastated by the absence of her father, whose death still sits like an unprocessed ache.
It is a familiar emotional cocktail for this show: intimacy laced with panic, humour doing the work of survival. But after the vows are sealed, the four women make a pact: to confront the patterns they keep dragging from season to season. It is a neat way to begin a finale. It is also, unfortunately, emblematic of a season more interested in tying ribbons than in pulling threads tighter.
India’s answer to Sex and the City, Girls
Created by Rangita Pritish Nandy with a screenplay by Devika Bhagat, Four More Shots Please! arrived in 2019 as a glossy response to a Hindi streaming ecosystem that had very little space for messy, urban female friendship. It positioned itself quite clearly as an Indian counterpoint to Sex and the City and Girls — less ironic, more melodramatic and indulgent, but driven by the same belief that women’s interior lives, sexual messiness, and friendships could sustain a long-form narrative.
Over three seasons, the series chronicled the lives of four women from Mumbai as they navigated work, desire, money, motherhood, and heartbreak. On one hand is Damini (Sayani Gupta), a sharp-tongued journalist perpetually at war with her own idealism and Umang (Bani J), a queer fitness trainer whose emotional life lags far behind her physical bravado.
And on the other hand, there is Anjana (Kirti Kulhari), a career-minded lawyer navigating divorce, single motherhood, and the slow reclamation of her selfhood, and Siddhi (Gagroo), the youngest in the group, a spoiled princess who goes from being the punchline to writing them as a stand-up comic.
The first season, directed by Anu Menon, was all provocation: sex toys, bad boyfriends, professional ambition, and the insistence that women could be as selfish, reckless, and contradictory as men. The second season, helmed by Nupur Asthana, built on it and leaned into consequences: broken friendships, public humiliation, addiction, and the limits of individual freedom.
The third season — the show’s weakest instalment — saw Damini drift into politics-adjacent media without clarity or conviction, Anjana confronting yet another transgressive romantic choice written more for shock than insight, Umang grappling with her queerness back home in Punjab, and Siddhi reeling from the death of her father.
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Directed by Joyeeta Patpatia, much of the third season unfolded through inexplicable decisions, rushed emotional pivots, and narrative leaps that felt careless rather than daring. The season was so uneven and mechanically assembled that it often felt like it should have been the show’s last, if only as a cautionary punishment for its own mediocrity.
The fourth season arrives, then, not as a triumphant return but as a corrective gesture, burdened with the task of cleaning up loose ends left behind. It also comes after a three-year gap. In streaming terms, that is an eternity. So, of course, the new season wants closure, redemption, and an air of finality. Except, it also inherits the exhaustion, emptiness, and creative hesitancy that the previous season made impossible to ignore.
A fresh rhythm and new pulse
Directed by Arunima Sharma and Neha Parti Matiyani (who shot the first two seasons), the fourth season quickly establishes its governing device: a self-improvement pact. Siddhi will stop being spoiled and emotionally evasive. Umang will stop treating every romantic connection like destiny.
Damini will stop second-guessing happiness and self-flagellating her desires. And Anjana will stop ageing prematurely. “Don’t mature like a provident fund just because you had a kid in your twenties,” her friends tell her in what is one of the better lines of the season (The dialogue is by Ishita Moitra). The setup is witty, on-brand, and efficient. It is also a little too tidy.
There are pleasures scattered across the episodes, even when the larger narrative feels underpowered. Gagroo remains the show’s strongest comic engine, especially when Siddhi tries her hand at stand-up comedy, mining her marriage and her husband’s fragile masculinity for laughs. Her timing is precise, her physicality relaxed, and she brings genuine warmth to what could have been a gimmicky arc.
The season also benefits from the arrival of Kunal Roy Kapur as Damini’s brother, an instance of genuinely inspired casting. His presence injects fresh rhythm into the series, briefly reorienting its emotional centre toward sibling dynamics and everyday intimacy rather than romantic churn.
The lived-in humour he brings, along with his easy, crackling chemistry with Gagroo, gives the show a pulse it has been missing. That the writing ultimately fails to do justice to his arc — easing him out without consequence or resolution — only underlines how welcome his shift in focus is while it lasts.
But beyond that, the season struggles to meaningfully evolve its three other protagonists. Anjana is handed a new love interest in Rohan Wanse (Dino Morea), a drum-circle enthusiast and adventure-travel entrepreneur who drifts into her life via a co-working space, complete with bike rides and soft-focus flirtation. While the romance offers her a brief reprieve, it ultimately feels like repetition without revelation — another man, another reset, with no new insight into Anjana’s desires or individuality.
Out of step with the moment
Damini, meanwhile, is repositioned as a podcaster speaking earnestly about young voter apathy, but the professional upgrade does little to deepen her character. She remains locked into a narrow emotional register, defined largely by scowls and romantic disillusionment, leaving Gupta with the least to do this season.
Umang’s storyline gestures toward expansiveness, as the show pushes harder on queer representation, dating across identities, attending queer support groups, and repeatedly putting herself back in the vulnerable position of wanting connection.
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The intent is both progressive and overdue: an asexual romantic interest, a lesbian wedding in Goa, and a charged, intimate kiss between Umang and Shai (Anasuya Sengupta), the newest object of her affection. The problem is that these beats are sketched rather than explored, introduced and resolved with such speed that they rarely accrue emotional weight. Representation in the show then, is expected to stand in for emotional complexity, which makes Umang’s journey appear more outlined than inhabited.
The three-year gap shows — unmistakably — in the writing. These seven episodes might have been received with kinder, sugar-coated indulgence had they arrived two years ago, but in 2025, the season feels curiously out of step with the moment. Its ideas about women’s bodies, hearts, and desires no longer feel urgent or exploratory. Rather, they feel dated, almost disinterested. The writing settles for low stakes and familiar rhythms, unable — or unwilling — to keep pace with a cultural landscape that has grown sharper and more self-aware.
Worse, the new season has nothing inventive to say about friendship, once the show’s selling point: that breezy, intimate, hard-earned likeability of women choosing each other again and again. That ease is gone, replaced by scenes that merely gesture at closeness rather than earning it. Indeed, the thinness of the writing seeps into most of the performances as well, with emotions registered at a surface level.
A lack of visual imagination
That, ultimately, is the season’s central flaw. For a final chapter, the emotional stakes rarely feel higher than they did before. Conflicts arise only to be smoothed over within an episode, longstanding wounds are resolved through exposition rather than drama, and tension gives way to reassurance. Even the actors falter under this flattening — Bani J, in particular, struggles in the more emotionally demanding moments in the final episode.
The direction, however, is the season’s flattest element. For a show, which on paper, remains so invested in texture — emotional, sexual, geographic — the fourth season is staged with a surprising lack of visual imagination. There is perhaps one genuinely inspired moment of form: a playful stretch of cross-cutting where Siddhi and her husband engage in phone sex from different rooms, the edit doing the work of intimacy, distance, and reconciliation all at once. But that spark is fleeting.
For the most part, the frames are functional to a fault, stripped of mood or point of view. Whether the characters are in Mumbai, Bangkok, or Goa, the locations register as interchangeable backdrops rather than lived-in spaces shaped by desire or consequence. There is little sense of visual rhythm, no use of framing or movement to heighten conflict or emotional shift. For a final season, the direction feels content to merely record scenes rather than interpret them and that passivity seeps into the show’s larger problem of lowered stakes and muted impact.
In that sense, Four More Shots Please! ends the way it lived: glossy, loud, and a little afraid of silence. The show that once thrived on friction chooses comfort for its final toast. You may still raise your glass. You may even smile. But you cannot shake the feeling that it could have burned just a little brighter before the lights went out.
