Four More Shots Please Season 3 Review: Entertaining But Not Intriguing Enough

Cast: Kirti Kulhari, Sayani Gupta, Prateik Babbar, Rohan Mehra, Bani J, Maanvi Gagroo, Simone Singh, Fahad Samar, Neil Bhoopalam, Sameer Kochhar, Sushant Singh, Shilpa Shukla, Jim Sarb, Amrita Puri, Milind Soman, Lisa Ray
Director: Joyeeta Patpatia

Right from the very first season it was clear that this series was a desi take on popular American TV show and movie series Sex and the City. Unfortunately, instead of making this relatable and real to the home city folks, it merely tries to transplant and foster a lifestyle and culture that seems pretty much alien to the natives here.

Four single girls navigating love and life in Mumbai might seem shockingly cool and aspirational to the young folks who gravitated to this series. The surfeit of sexual content, alcoholism, violence and foul language might also be another salient feature.

But the quartet of women in their late twenties, putting it all out there, for the audience to play voyeur with their see-sawing life and decisions, comes across as totally fake.

Whoever imagined unpeopled Mumbai (day or night), while four women in fancy couture and high heels sashay about town, without a care, must most certainly be living a dream. What's real here though, are the emotions that each woman experiences as an integral part of their rites of passage.

Four More Shots Please Season 3, the latest, at 10 episodes, continues down the same threadbare path getting the four women into trouble with men and careers and then pulling them out - unapologetic and self-affirming spiel intact.

While the series overloads on the cool quotient, it fails to be original or intriguing. It's certainly entertaining to see the four friends putting themselves at risk, making a fool of themselves again and again, and coming out of it all pretty much unscathed.

Damini (Sayani Gupta), Umang (Bani J), Anjana (Kirti Kulhari) and Siddhi (Maanvi Gagroo were down in the dumps when we last saw them. This new season too has them navigating the same tiresome path while trying to mend themselves, and in turn, hurting some more.

The storylines seem to have gotten into a rut, with each woman unable to make much progress emotionally or metaphorically. The sub-plots may be different (with additional characters) but the hang-ups, hook-ups and trauma, follow a set pattern that even the new director Joyeeta Patpatia fails to lend a freshness to.

In this unreal world of working and rich women / men with endless streams of money to do as they please, the struggle is all emotional. Here, even the working-class, single mother wears expensive designer gowns just to have a drink in a bar with friends. It's like watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - but the characters here are not meant to be famous.

Like Sex and the City, this show too has become a sort of audio-visual advertisement for luxury goods. That the women at the centre of it all experience highs and lows in their efforts to sustain love, has now been relegated to becoming a sort of prop meant to put that brand endorsement idea forward. In fact, much of what the women experience here feels harpy, whiny, childish and totally selfish.

Instead of being a popular anthropological tale about the inhabitants of a Megapolis, this series becomes a scatter-shot depiction of women who vacillate between lives and loves in their effort to get validation.

While the overall tone is bitter-sweet and fairly ingratiating, there is a distinct lack of humour and cynicism.

Since this is a women-centres series, the men amount to mere bees buzzing around the honeycomb.

This season though, takes us deeper into the families of the four women, thus lending them a dimension that was hitherto unseen.

Siddhi's relationship with her mother (Simone Singh) following the death of her beloved father (Fahad Samar) is one of the major subplots here - just as Varun see-sawing between his ex and present wives; Umang falling in and out of love while swinging both ways and Damini carping about her aborted career while in a stunted relationship with Jeh.

Prateik Babbar as Jeh, Rohan Mehra as Dhananjay, Samir Kochhar as Shashank, and Neil Bhoopalam as Varun do well to keep the flag flying while the women flit around doing their thing.

This season of the series may not be the best thing to hit the OTT screens but it certainly has a gravitational pull that's all credit to Kirti Kulhari, Sayani Gupta, Maanvi Gagroo and Bani J who literally live-up to the characters they assay!