Sisterhood, Sex, And Saying It Out Loud: Seven Years Of Four More Shots Please!

Seven years is a long time in pop culture. Long enough for trends to peak and fade, for outrage cycles to exhaust themselves, for shows to be cancelled quietly after one risky season. And yet, Four More Shots Please! keeps returning, louder, glossier, messier, softer, still clinking glasses with its audience, still refusing to apologise for the space it occupies. Love it or loathe it, the series has done something few Indian shows before it dared to do: place women, their friendships, their desires, their failures, and their contradictions at the centre, and keep them there.

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When Four More Shots Please! premiered on Amazon Prime Video, it arrived trailing controversy. Accusations of being ‘too Western’, ‘too elite’, ‘too sexual’, ‘too much’ followed almost immediately. But beneath the noise was something quietly radical. For perhaps the first time in Indian streaming, women were not being observed, they were doing the looking. The gaze had shifted.

Much like Sex and the City redefined how women were seen, spoken about, and marketed to on Western television, Four More Shots Please! became India’s own cultural lightning rod. It wasn’t just about sex, cocktails, or couture. It was about agency. About women being allowed to be the protagonists of their own lives, not moral lessons or narrative devices in someone else’s journey.

Sisterhood As the Central Love Story

Rangita Pritish Nandy, President and Creative Director at Pritish Nandy Communications, is clear that provocation was never the point. “When we started Four More Shots Please!, the intention was never to be provocative; it was to be honest and to represent normal everyday women in a normal everyday kinda way,” she says. What the show set out to foreground was sisterhood—the deep, sustaining intimacy of female friendships that Indian cinema had long relegated to the margins.

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“Girlfriends are the real romances of our lives,” Nandy adds. “The people who let you be, when that’s what you need, and the same people who jumpstart you when you need that solid kick in your butt.” In a culture where women were often written as accessories to men’s stories, Four More Shots Please! flipped the script. These women were not sidekicks. They were the main characters—messy, opinionated, ambitious, heartbroken, joyful.

Streaming, Nandy believes, made this possible. OTT platforms loosened the moral chokehold that theatrical releases had long operated under. Stories about women—by women, for women—finally had room to breathe. And with Four More Shots Please! leading the charge, a wave followed: Churails, Maharani, Masaba Masaba, Made in Heaven, Delhi Crime, Aarya. These were stories that may never have survived the box office test, but instead embedded themselves firmly into everyday cultural conversations.

Women, Unfiltered

For Maanvi Gagroo, who plays Siddhi Patel, the show’s impact lies in its refusal to sanitise womanhood. “It was one of the first shows to show women as ‘normal’ human beings,” she says. Women who make mistakes, who spiral and recover, who are neat and messy in equal measure. “They are universes in themselves.”

Crucially, this authenticity extended behind the camera too. Four More Shots Please! marked the first time Gagroo worked with a predominantly female crew—an experience that quietly but powerfully reshaped the dynamics of storytelling. Whether one liked the show or not, she says, its influence on the Indian OTT landscape is undeniable. From encouraging women to put themselves first—a luxury still denied to many—to emboldening them through fashion and self-expression, the series seeped into the cultural zeitgeist.

The fashion, often dismissed by critics as frivolous, became its own form of storytelling. Clothes were not costumes to be judged but extensions of character, fluid, confident, experimental. 

A Global Sisterhood

Sayani Gupta, who plays the fiercely complex Damini Rizvi Roy, speaks about the show’s reach with a sense of wonder. Recognition has followed her across continents—from Australia to Cairo, from quiet street corners to bustling markets. “The love for the show goes beyond borders,” she says, recalling being recognised by fans from Taiwan in Egypt. What resonates, clearly, is not geography but emotion.

Over seven years, the cast has grown alongside their characters. “We’re not just different on the outside—we’ve evolved as people,” Gupta reflects. Four More Shots Please! isn’t just a show they worked on; it is a shared life chapter, a collective coming-of-age.

Even Prateik Smita Patil, who plays Jeh, acknowledges the show’s role in reshaping the OTT ecosystem. Shooting through most of his thirties, he witnessed firsthand the medium’s rapid evolution. “Since the show premiered, the OTT space has evolved rapidly—with bolder stories, sharper writing, and more fearless characters,” he says, adding that Four More Shots Please! helped pave the way for what followed.

Loved, Hated, Still Standing

Perhaps the most telling statistic comes from Nandy herself: Four More Shots Please! is consumed more by men than women. A detail that complicates the narrative around who the show is ‘for’—and who gets uncomfortable when women speak freely. The outrage, the policing of morality, the discomfort with women who drink, swear, have sex, and hold strong opinions was never really about excess. “That’s not to get your attention,” Nandy says. “That’s just us. Suck it up.”

Seven years on, the show’s endurance feels like its greatest triumph. In an industry still reluctant to fund women-led narratives with the same budgets and marketing muscle as testosterone-driven spectacles, Four More Shots Please! has survived—and thrived.

It may not be perfect. It was never meant to be. But like the women it portrays, it is unapologetically alive—laughing loudly, stumbling often, loving fiercely. And in doing so, it carved out space for a female gaze that Indian television can no longer pretend doesn’t exist.

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