Four More Shots Please! and What Only a Friend Gets to Say

They met in a washroom. Not at the bar, where people look and are looked at, but in the small room behind it where a woman goes to fix her face, or to cry, or to take a call she does not want the table to hear. Four strangers happened to be in the washroom of a Mumbai bar called Truck on the same night, and three years later they are still meeting there over shots of tequila. Four More Shots Please! is the story of what that table becomes across four seasons, from the first in January 2019 to the last in December 2025.

Its first episode carries a title that reads like a list of charges: Ambitious. Prude. Feminist. Slut. Four words for four women, and the title never says which word is meant for whom. It does not need to. These are the words that tend to arrive before a woman who talks frankly about sex and work has finished her sentence, and the series spends four seasons refusing to let any one of them stick to any one of its women for long.

This essay discusses all four seasons, including how each woman’s story ends and how the series closes. If you would rather meet the four first, it will keep.

Now the other end. The final season opens at a wedding, Siddhi’s, and after the vows, in a quiet moment away from the celebration, the four make a pact. Each is told, by the other three, the one thing she keeps doing and must stop, and each is given six months. Siddhi is to stop being spoiled and evasive about what she feels. Umang is to stop treating every new romance as destiny. Damini is to stop second-guessing happiness and punishing herself for what she wants. Anjana, who had her daughter young, is to stop growing old before her time.

Four words at the start, four sentences at the end. The distance between them is what this essay is about. Everyone in these women’s lives has a word for them: a mother assembling her daughter’s marriage résumé, a family gathered round a matchmaking dinner, a company board, an ex-husband threatening to take a child. Only the friends have a sentence. A word says what you are. A sentence says what you keep doing, which means you could do otherwise, and the sentences in that pact are spoken by the only people in the series who have earned the standing to say them, to her face, with her agreement.

That, the series comes to suggest, is what friendship is for. Not company, which these four have in abundance. Not only confession, which the bar supplies every night. Accuracy: being described truly by people who stayed, and saying yes to hearing it.

And when every romance has been settled one way or another, the last thing the series gives us is not a wedding. It is the four of them together, calling for four more shots.

The record first. Four More Shots Please! was made for Prime Video by Pritish Nandy Communications. It was created by Rangita Pritish Nandy and written by Devika Bhagat and Ishita Moitra; Anu Menon directed the first season, Nupur Asthana the second, Joyeeta Patpatia the third, and Arunima Sharma and Neha Parti Matiyani the fourth. The seasons arrived on 25 January 2019, 17 April 2020 and 21 October 2022, and the fourth and final one, seven episodes long, on 19 December 2025. It was the first Indian original on Prime Video to be led entirely by women, and within a week of its release India Today was calling it a home-grown Sex and the City, a comparison that stuck. In 2020 it was nominated for the International Emmy for best comedy series, which the International Academy records as the first nomination for an Indian comedy.

The four are introduced in one breath and deserve more than one. Damini Rizvi Roy, played by Sayani Gupta, is an investigative journalist who built a news start-up on her own reporting and puts her work above everything, including anyone who might try to hold on to her. Anjana Menon, played by Kirti Kulhari, is a corporate lawyer, divorced, raising her young daughter, Arya, while her ex-husband, Varun, moves on with someone new; she keeps putting the child and the job ahead of anything she might want for herself. Umang Singh, played by Bani J, is a personal trainer from Ludhiana, in Punjab, who calls commitment a jail and has not told her family that she is bisexual. Siddhi Patel, played by Maanvi Gagroo, is the youngest, the daughter of a wealthy family, and her mother mocks her weight while hunting for a husband for her.

The essay takes the four one at a time, each with the word she is handed, and then comes back to the table. Most of its weight falls on the first season, where the words are handed out; on the second, where the friendship breaks and is mended; and on the last, where the pact is made. The third is used where the four stories pass through it.

Start with the youngest, because her word is the plainest. In the first episodes her mother, Sneha, has made Siddhi’s marriage her personal project: a fortune teller, singing lessons, a blind date, a résumé being assembled for a market in which her daughter’s body is the one line she keeps wanting to correct. The series frames the mockery of Siddhi’s weight as what it is, harm done in the name of a daughter’s future, and it never asks its audience to share Sneha’s arithmetic. It asks us to watch what that arithmetic does to a young woman at her own dinner table.

What Siddhi does next is the series’ boldest decision about her, and it should be described the way the series describes it. She begins working, in secret, as a cam girl, performing online for paying strangers. It is easy to moralise about this and easy to romanticise it, and both miss its shape. It is neither a triumph nor a fall. A daughter whose body is being corrected at home finds a room where the same body is wanted as it is, on terms she sets, behind a screen she controls. Whatever else it is, it is one of the first things in her story that Siddhi has chosen entirely for herself.

The screen does not hold. An anonymous man finds her out and threatens to expose her unless she does what he wants, and when he shows himself he is the father of Mihir, the man she has begun seeing, and what he wants is sexual favours in exchange for his silence. She hits him. The series is clear about what has happened, and this essay should be too. Her agreement to be watched by strangers, on her terms, was never an agreement to be identified, and nothing a man extracts with a threat is consent to anything. The blackmail does not so much reveal her secret as confiscate it. It takes a thing she had arranged for herself and turns it into a lever against her.

The secret reaches her parents anyway. Her father, who had always been her ally, turns away. Her mother, the woman who had been measuring her for a husband, stands by her. The series will not leave Sneha as the voice of the market, and it keeps refusing to. After Siddhi’s father dies, Sneha falls for someone new, and it is Siddhi who cannot bear it, who fights her mother over it, and who in the end has to apologise. The daughter who was measured has to learn, painfully, not to measure her mother.

In between, Siddhi finds the thing that becomes her voice. Stand-up comedy is, among other things, the opposite of the screen she hid behind: her own name, her own words, a room that has come to hear her rather than to look at her. It is where the youngest of the four stops being described and starts describing. And the series follows that new power to its uncomfortable edge. In the last season, newly married, she turns her marriage into material without asking her husband; the jokes land, a viral sketch with Damini’s brother, Ash, makes things worse, and the marriage nearly goes. The trouble, as the series tells it, is less the jokes than what she kept from him: she never asked him, and she hid from him how much the stage had come to matter. The woman whose own story was once taken from her by a threat learns that a story with somebody else in it needs that person’s yes as well.

Umang’s word is one that nobody at home says out loud, which is its own kind of word. She left Ludhiana, and a first love, Pinky, who went on to marry Umang’s brother, and now she trains other people’s bodies in Mumbai and calls commitment a jail. Her family does not know she is bisexual. Her friends do. Asked by them whether she will ever tell her family, she jokes that there is only so much a carpet can cover.

Then she falls for Samara Kapoor, a film star she has admired since she was a girl and who is now her client. It is a love conducted in hiding, because Samara’s career depends on it, until the tabloids decide the matter for both of them and out Samara. Nobody in that transaction asked anybody. Samara drops her.

The news reaches Umang at the worst table imaginable. Her mother has arranged a dinner with the family of a prospective groom, a man her mother has chosen, and Umang has agreed to sit through it. The story of the outed actress arrives at the table as gossip. And Umang, who had not planned to say anything that night, says that the woman with Samara in the story was her, and that she is bisexual, and walks out. The shape of the scene is exact. The dinner at which her family meant to fit her to a man is the place where she chooses the word for herself. A newspaper chose the moment. The word was hers.

What the series does with the word afterwards matters as much as the scene. It never takes it back. Across four seasons Umang is drawn to women and to men, and nothing in the writing treats that as a phase to be outgrown, a problem to be solved or a twist to be revealed. What the series treats as the wound is the silence: her family stops speaking to her after the dinner, and in the third season her father’s acceptance, when it finally comes, lands as the thing she had been waiting for all her life.

The second season is harder. Samara, outed and out of work, goes through a depression, and the series tells us that she lives with bipolar disorder; Umang becomes the one person holding her up. Samara eventually comes out publicly, Umang’s own career rises in the attention, and Samara proposes. Umang says yes. The wedding, at a palace hotel in Udaipur, becomes a production in the full glare of social media, Samara takes over the planning, and moments before the ceremony Umang learns of a decision Samara has made about their future. At the altar, Umang ends it.

It is worth being exact about what this essay reads into that and what it does not. It does not read Samara’s illness as the reason. The reasons the series gives are Umang’s own: a love in which she had become the only support, a wedding that had grown into someone else’s production, a yes that no longer described what she felt. A yes can be withdrawn at any point before the thing it agreed to, and the altar is the most expensive place there is to withdraw it, and it is still hers to withdraw.

Two seasons later, with her studio thriving and her nights empty, an invitation arrives to Samara’s own wedding. Umang panics. She asks Shai, a new investor in her studio, to come as her date, and Shai says no; she tries to stop the others from going; then she goes, and there, at last, she finds her closure. In the final episode she tells Shai, at Pride and in public, what she feels. The pact had told her to stop treating every romance as destiny. What she does instead is simpler and braver. She says what she feels and lets it be an offer.

Anjana’s word is the hardest in the series, and it is delivered without being said. At the end of the first season a call comes that her daughter has a fever. Anjana has been drinking. She drives, with the child in the car, and crashes. The season ends with her under arrest and with Varun threatening to take custody. The series lets those consequences speak, and this essay will neither add a sermon to them nor subtract anything from them.

What the series does next is more interesting than punishment. It keeps asking Anjana what she wants, and she keeps not answering. She is a mother first, a lawyer second and a woman with wants of her own a distant third, and nobody in particular imposed the order. It is simply the order she has lived in since she had her daughter young. This Library’s essay “The Mother and the Woman: Single Parenting and a Romantic Life” argued that the two framings usually offered to a single mother, pity and admiration, both erase the person with a body, a Saturday and a want of her own. Anjana has money, which the mothers in that essay often do not. What she has not had is the Saturday.

At work the second season gives her a new senior who doubts her ability because she is a woman, and she walks out rather than stay under him. Then she joins the firm of Shashank, a rival she has just beaten in court, and falls for him. Here consent has to be kept in plain view, because the series blurs it and a critic noticed. Writing for Autostraddle, the reviewer Himani described Anjana as drawn into an affair with a married colleague who kept pressing after she had said, more than once, that she did not want a sexual relationship with him. He told her his marriage was open. It was not. Whatever Anjana agreed to, she agreed to a version of the facts that he had invented, and the one person whose agreement an open marriage actually requires, his wife, had never been asked. When it comes out, it is Anjana who is left feeling guilty, and it is her friends who help her see it differently. They are right to.

The third season brings Varun back into her home, to the delight of her daughter, who is thrilled to have both parents under one roof. For a while Anjana lets herself try on the shape of the family she once had. Then she sends Varun back to his other family, and realises she does not need him in order to have a family of her own. It is one of the quietest and best decisions in the series, and it is entirely hers.

Which brings her to the pact, and to its funniest sentence. Her friends tell her to stop growing old before her time, to stop living as though having a child in her twenties had used up the rest of her life. In the last season she meets Rohan, a neighbour at her co-working space, enjoys him, and then tries to keep her distance because it is all going too fast; it is her friends who release her from the pact and tell her he is worth it, and in Goa she chooses him. Then she does something the series had never let her do. She takes a sabbatical, and goes to ride across India.

Damini’s first word comes from a boardroom. She is the investigative journalist of the four, the woman whose work is to describe other people accurately whether they like it or not, and the company she built on that work is the first thing the series takes from her. Her board would rather have sensation and clickbait than the journalism she does, and by the middle of the first season a newcomer, Akanksha, has taken charge and the company has slipped out of her hands. The word that lasts longer is the one she gives herself. She is also the one who runs from anybody who might hold on to her, and the series goes on taking things from her. Her book is turned down by publishers and banned once it is out. And in the second season, pregnant by one man, Dr Aamir Warsi, while falling for another, Jeh, she goes back and forth over whether to continue the pregnancy, and then loses it, just as Jeh comes back ready to accept her and the child together.

A critic objected to how the series handled that, and the objection deserves stating. Autostraddle’s reviewer thought the storyline seemed to imply that a woman who is shown pictures of babies will not end a pregnancy, and then, in her phrase, resolved it with a miscarriage for narrative expedience. Whatever one makes of the first half of that complaint, the second half is about structure, and this essay shares it. The one decision in Damini’s life that was entirely hers is the one the story takes out of her hands.

In the third season she runs a politician’s campaign, the work thrills her, and she cheats on Jeh. She tells him. They part. The telling does not undo what she did, and the series does not pretend that it does; it lets the broken agreement cost what it costs. And then Damini does the thing the series treats as her real turn. She decides she needs to be alone, not as a punishment and not as a pause between men, but as a place to find out what she wants when nobody is holding her and she is not running.

The pact tells her to stop second-guessing happiness and punishing herself for wanting. In the last season she weighs freezing her eggs, a decision the series leaves where it belongs, with her. Her brother, Ash, turns up from Delhi and stays, and the two of them start a podcast that becomes a hit; one critic noticed the season briefly moving its emotional centre away from romance and towards a sister and a brother, which is its own kind of love and one the series had not bothered with before. Then, in Goa, Jeh is single again, and she finds her way back to him. Choosing to be alone first is what lets her choose him without running.

Now the friendship itself, which the series treats less gently than its reputation suggests. At the end of the first season Siddhi, being blackmailed, sends the others an urgent message to meet her at the bar. They come. And instead of helping her, they fight. Every grievance of the season comes out at once, the four start blaming one another, and they leave in different directions. Siddhi decides to deal with it alone. Anjana is left alone at the bar.

Look at what the finale does next. Each of the four meets her worst hour, and each meets it alone. Siddhi faces the man who has been threatening her. Umang sits through the matchmaking dinner. Damini, at an award ceremony, tries to call Umang and cannot reach her, and later finds the man she wants back with his former girlfriend. Anjana takes the call about her daughter. The series does not say the fight caused any of it, and this essay will not either: what each woman did that evening was her own. But it places four crises in the one episode in which the four are not a table, and the placing is an argument. The friendship is not where problems get solved. It is what these women do not have on the night they need it most.

The second season opens four months later with the four not speaking. It takes a frantic call from Siddhi, who has ended up in Istanbul with no clear idea how, to bring the others to her, and there, in a city that belongs to none of them, they make it up and promise one another a friendship that lasts. The episode is called Together Forever?, and the question mark is honest.

This Library’s essay “Everything I Know About Love and the Loves That Keep a Life From Becoming Too Narrow”, reading Dolly Alderton’s memoir, found that friendship is the one love with no plot: no proposal, no ceremony, no anniversary, and no ending that anybody is told about, because friendships do not break, they fade. Four More Shots Please! sets out to supply what that essay found missing. It gives the friendship the grammar romance keeps for itself: a meeting that can be dated, in a washroom; a fight in public; a silence of four months; a reconciliation abroad, with promises; and, in the last season, a pact made at a wedding, after the vows. The series cannot make friendship official, and it does not try. It makes it tellable, which may be what friendship most lacks.

The same essay argued that a life is wide not because of the number of people in it but because of the number of distinct things that can make an evening good. By the end of the series Damini has a microphone, a brother, a man she no longer runs from and three women who know her. Anjana has a road. None of the romances ends the series. The friendship does, with a standing order.

Which brings us back to the pact, and to the difference this essay has been circling. Set its four sentences beside the four words of the first episode’s title. The words are verdicts. They say what a woman is, and a woman cannot stop being what she is. The pact’s sentences have verbs in them. They describe what she keeps doing, which means she could do something else, and they come with a date.

They also come from the only people in the series who have earned the right to say them. The mother measuring Siddhi, the relatives around Umang’s dinner table, the board that takes Damini’s company, the man threatening to take Anjana’s daughter: each of them has a word for her, and none of them has sat through the nights when she was not good company. The friends have. They sat through the fight and the four months of silence and went to Istanbul anyway. That is their standing, and it is the only credential the series seems to recognise.

There is one more difference, and it turns this from a matter of tact into a matter of consent. Nobody asked Sneha for her opinion of her daughter’s body. Nobody asked the tabloids to describe Samara. The pact is honesty agreed to in advance: each woman sits down knowing she is about to hear something true about herself, and says yes. It is the principle the series keeps operational in its sexual storylines, turned towards the truth. A description, like a touch, can be welcome or unwelcome, and what decides which is whether she agreed.

This Library has sat at a table with four women before. “Happy Hour, and What Four Women Say to Each Other”, on Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s five-hour film about four friends in Kobe, drew a line between company, which the women in that film have in abundance, and disclosure, of which they have almost none. Four More Shots Please! sits at the opposite pole. Its four disclose everything, loudly, nightly; the bar exists for it. And yet the series seems to discover, late, that disclosure is not the last good either. The pact adds a third. Not telling your friends about yourself, but letting them tell you about yourself.

Another essay here, “Intimacy Is Not Closeness. It Is Being Accurately Known.”, argued that what people are mourning when they say intimacy has gone is not closeness but accuracy: a picture of you, held by someone else, that matches who you actually are. The pact is that picture said aloud, by the three people who hold it, to the one person it describes. If you have friends who have sat through your worst nights, they very probably already know your sentence. They may be waiting to be asked.

For a reader in Japan the nearest comparison is not Sex and the City, the one every reviewer reached for, but Tokyo Tarareba Musume, the 2017 drama in which three friends of thirty drink at the same izakaya night after night and talk about the lives they might have had, if only. The two series share more than a bar. In Tarareba the three are named by a man: a sharp young model tells them they are tarareba women, women who live on if-onlys, and the series half agrees with him. At the very end, when he calls the heroine by the label one last time, she tells him it is not her name. In Four More Shots Please! the naming comes, in the end, from the friends, to each other’s faces, with a deadline and a yes. And both series close the same way, not with a wedding but with the friends making a date: three women promising to watch the Tokyo Olympics together, with or without men, and four women calling for another round.

These are two series, not two countries, and neither measures anything. It would be easy to watch the Mumbai four and conclude that women there say more, or that women here say less, and both conclusions would be about television, not about women. Four More Shots Please! is loud because it is built as a comedy of frank talk, in the shape reviewers traced back to New York; Hamaguchi’s film is quiet because he made it that way, in Kobe. On Filmarks, the Japanese review site, viewers keep reaching for the same shorthand, the Indian or the Mumbai Sex and the City, and several notice how rich its world is, one of them wondering aloud whether what they are watching is Mumbai or money. It is a fair question. The four are a corporate lawyer, a journalist with her own company, a trainer whose client is a film star and the daughter of a wealthy family, and their friendship travels to Istanbul, a palace hotel in Udaipur, Goa and Bangkok. They are four women, not a sample of a country, and the series has never pretended otherwise.

What travels is not the volume. It is the table. For a reader here the table may not be a bar at all. It may be a family restaurant beside a suburban highway at ten at night, glasses refilled from the drink bar once the children are asleep; or a group chat that has been running since school and wakes up whenever one of its members is in trouble. What matters is not the setting. It is whether anyone at it has the standing, and the invitation, to tell you the sentence.

For a woman who has come to Japan from somewhere else, the table may be in another time zone. The people with the standing to tell her the truth about herself may be the ones she left behind, reachable only at hours when one of them is always tired. The series has an image for that as well. Its great reconciliation happens in Istanbul, a city none of the four lives in. A friendship can be kept across a distance, and a pact can be made on a screen.

Now the objections, made as strongly as they can be. There are five, and the third should not be softened.

First, the pact may be less than this essay makes of it. Writing for The Federal when the last season arrived, the critic Poulomi Das found its set-up witty and efficient and a little too tidy, and argued that the season had nothing inventive to say about friendship, its scenes gesturing at closeness rather than earning it. On that view the pact is a device for tying up four stories in seven episodes, and a self-improvement plan with a six-month deadline is project management, not intimacy. Other critics saw it differently. India Today’s reviewer, Sana Farzeen, found the portrayal of female friendship the show’s strongest suit, most alive in the moments where nothing dramatic happens: a late drink after a bad day, a silent show of support. Both readings are available, and this one does not dissolve the first.

Second, and sharper: the line drawn here between a friend’s sentence and a family’s verdict is thinner than this essay would like. The same friends who make the pact talk Siddhi through her wedding-day panic by telling her that the man who has always accepted her as she is is the right one, and release Anjana from the pact to tell her Rohan is worth keeping. By the final episode three of the four have been returned to men, in Goa, by a pact that was supposed to be about themselves, and Das called Anjana’s new romance repetition without revelation, another man and another reset. A reader who sees in the last season the oldest story on television, best friends as the heroine’s route to the right man, has read it accurately enough. The most this essay can say is that the friends’ push comes from people who will still be at the table if she refuses it.

Third. The wedding the second season builds towards, between two women, is the one it ends at the altar. Writing for Autostraddle in May 2021, Himani called that season a betrayal and argued that breaking up Samara and Umang at their wedding felt like a delegitimisation of queer relationships as a whole, in a country that had decriminalised homosexuality only three years before and where same-sex marriage is not legal. The legal record bears out her context. India’s Supreme Court struck down the criminalisation of consensual sex between adults of the same sex on 6 September 2018, less than five months before the series began, and on 17 October 2023 it declined to recognise same-sex marriage, leaving the question to Parliament. She also questioned the implication that Samara could manage her illness only through the relationship. This essay’s point, that Umang’s no at the altar is hers and that a yes can be withdrawn, is true of the character and does not answer the critic, because her objection is not about Umang. It is about what a series chooses to end, and which weddings it lets go through. Both things are true at once, and a reader who holds the second against the series is not wrong.

Fourth, the table costs money. The friendship that survives four seasons does so partly on flights, hotels and bar bills, and a woman working two jobs may reasonably feel that the series’ idea of a friend’s standing assumes a kind of free time she has never had. The objection is right about the series. It is less right about the principle, because the standing the pact depends on was earned by staying, and staying is the one thing in the series that nobody pays for.

The last objection is the plainest. A house that sells private companionship has an obvious interest in an essay concluding that women need a table where they are truly heard. A reader who suspects the conclusion was waiting before the series began is entitled to the suspicion, and the next section tries to answer it by claiming less rather than more.

This house sells private companionship: bounded, arranged, paid for. So, before anything else, the part that runs against us. What this series is about cannot be bought. The friends’ standing to tell a woman the truth about herself was earned on the nights she was not good company, over years, for nothing. Nobody at an arranged evening has that standing, and a companion who spoke as though they did would be taking a liberty, not providing a service.

An evening here is an arrangement with a beginning and an end, in which one person’s attention is directed at another for an agreed time. It is not a friendship, and it should never be allowed to stand in for one. If it ever began to replace the table, if the friends were being scheduled around it, it would be narrowing a life rather than widening it, however it felt at the time. That test is hers to apply, not ours.

This is a reading of a television series. It diagnoses no one, the four fictional women included, and it says nothing about any real person’s inner life. Samara’s diagnosis is the series’ own, reported as the series gives it. The legal dates are the court’s; the critics are paraphrased except where a phrase is plainly theirs; and the four are not offered as evidence about women anywhere, in India, in Japan or elsewhere.

Who in your life has a word for you, and who has a sentence? Notice how differently each one lands.

Is there a sentence you would let a friend say to you, if she asked first? Have you asked her?

Whose story have you been telling lately, at work, at dinner, to a room, and did they agree to be in it?

When a friendship of yours broke, did anyone treat it as an event? If you had to mend it somewhere that belonged to neither of you, where would you go?

If your friends wrote your four sentences, what would they say? And which of them would you have wanted to hear ten years ago?