It’s been three years since an all-female, all-Muslim band burst onto the TV scene with We Are Lady Parts, a single-camera British sitcom about rockers in their twenties navigating the traditions of both Islam and punk. If that seems like a long gap between TV seasons, just think of what it feels like for a fledgling musical act. While the on-screen time elapsed between seasons appears closer to one year later than three, life’s clock keeps ticking for the central quartet and their dedicated manager (Lucie Shorthouse).
Since cautious, well-behaved Amina (Anjana Vasan) finally, fully committed to the band in the Season 1 finale, Lady Parts has coalesced as a gig-booking, fan-accumulating, repertoire-expanding actual band. But they don’t have a full record or next-level success to show for it. No one feels that more acutely than Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), the band’s founder and frontwoman. On the cusp of 30, she’s feeling desperate for a mark of accomplishment that won’t sell out her punk-rock ideals. To borrow a phrase from Girls5eva, which debuted on Peacock the same year as Lady Parts, she’s hoping to enter “album mode.”
Anyone jumping into We Are Lady Parts hoping for the gag density of their similarly named, more pop-inclined ex-labelmates might come away disappointed. Lady Parts is many things — swiftly paced, strikingly shot, packed with likable characters—but it’s only occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, often playing more like a dramedy with extra stylistic zip. Yet the real absence felt in this genre hybridization isn’t really the jokes; it’s the plotting, which sometimes gets caught between serialized drama and tidier, more episodic comedy.
The first two episodes, for example, both introduce a problem—Amina’s overstepping boss is one, Bisma (Faith Omole) being accused of hypocrisy by her rebellious daughter is the other—only to have characters regain their mojo through songwriting. In both cases, either the problem itself or the ensuing song seems poised to create further friction, whether in the form of affecting drama or comic mishaps. Instead, the song abruptly ends the plotline, and the episodes drop other, unrelated developments to carry over into the next installment.
Bigger shifts happen off-screen, which sometimes feels appropriately expedient and sometimes feels as if the show’s ensemble is elbowing for time in a six-episode season. Amina, the clear focus last season, cedes a little of her screen time to the others. She still narrates the episodes and navigates the season’s main love triangle, as her longtime crush Ahsan (Zaqi Ismail), brother of her bandmate Ayesha (Juliette Motamed), unwittingly introduces her to the Don McLean-singing troubadour of her dreams (who also happens to be a white boy, in case “Don McLean” wasn’t enough of a tip-off). But the show feels more evenly distributed, reflected in longer and more frequent musical performances. When the band plays a covers-only wedding, “Oops! I Did It Again” appears in full, including, amusingly, the Titanic-referencing dialogue breakdown. There are also leaps into music-video territory, and the season as a whole has some weirder, wilder passages than its more setup-heavy predecessor.
A great, unstated irony of We Are Lady Parts is that the decaying economics of playing music for a living have forcibly flattened all kinds of acts into punk-rock scrappiness, while simultaneously allowing almost no one the luxury of ideological purity. The show doesn’t get too downhearted about it, but series creator, writer, and director Nida Manzoor seems to understand that the struggle to make art doesn’t end just because you’re in the pocket with your perfect collaborators. One of the smartest threads of the season has to do with Second Wife, an upstart, pop-leaning band of Muslims following in the wake of Lady Parts, and the mix of sisterhood and contempt they engender (especially when these internet-savvy zoomers cover a Lady Parts song, which manages to feel like both a touching tribute and an alarming power grab).
Eventually, Manzoor turns away from potential rivalry and toward what may be a personal form of self-critique, as when an outsider observes that Lady Parts are a “positive band, spreading good cheer.” She means it as a compliment, but this also chafes Saira in particular, who’s wary of turning her act into “funny Muslim songs.” Are high-spirited affirmations that acknowledge major problems without necessarily tackling them full-on really the stuff of great art? The lack of a clear answer may account for the way We Are Lady Parts itself moves between ebullient semi-fantasy and hard truths within the space of 25-minute episodes. It’s fascinating to watch a show that seems to actually (at least occasionally) mistrust its own feel-great ambitions. Or maybe, like the band, Manzoor is finding a new way into the pop-punk form.
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