iWorld
‘Four More Shots Please!’ Season 2 raises the bar
MUMBAI: Take four beautiful Indian women from the upper class of society who are thick friends. Have them dressed and made up like they are walking the ramp, and at other times have them in the buff, frolicking with various paramours. Follow their romantic and sexual escapades. And of course give them this propensity for quaffing alcohol shots and an inane ability to get their hearts broken again and again, without any lessons being learnt at all.
So what have you got?
Amazon Prime Video’s Four More Shots Please (FMSP) Season 1.
Now put in a lot more heart. Continue with their excessive horniness. Add on layers and growth arcs to their characters. Inject a progressive narrative, while focusing on their strengths and weakness, their successes and their failings, into the script. Make them believable. And this time you have got Four More Shots Please Season 2.
Clearly in its new edition, the chick digital original series is a leap over the first one. Whether it’s writer Devika Bhagat who has put together a lot more soul into each of the four protagonists – Anjana , Damini, Siddhi and Umang Singh – or Nupur Asthana (remember Hip Hip Hooray) who has helmed the 10 episodes, the Pritish Nandy-produced, Ishita-and-Rangita Nandy-show-run series is definitely an improvement over season 1.
The locations and art direction are of course lavish; attention to detail in the sets is remarkable. The Truck Bar appears once again and is almost a character, a prominent host to many more tequila shot drinking and secret sharing sessions. The costumes and the styling are clearly tops.
During FMSP 2, viewers will discover how Siddhi Patel (Maanvi Gagroo) unearths her true calling as a standup comic, that she has a libido which she has to quench and that she is no longer a rich spoilt girl but is now a woman in her own right. Umang Singh (Gurbani) and Samara Kapoor (Lisa Ray) will understand they cannot live without each other and also the true meaning of love. Damini (Sayani Gupta) will go boldly where she has never gone before in her writing as well as her relationship with Aamir Warsi (Milind Soman) and Jeh (Prateik Babbar). Anjana (Kirti Kulhari) will find the going tough in her law firm, strike out on her own, have affairs and finally land up in a soup and feeling guilty as hell.
The series begins with three of the friends in India flying out to meet a hysterical Siddhi in Turkey after being incommunicado with each other for three to four months and follows the individual progress in their lives thereafter.
The performances are laudatory and all the four ladies get a chance to stand out living up to what the roles demand of them. They grow on you and you begin to relate to them, you like them – maybe more so because they sail into uncharted waters, despite the fact that they are bubbling over with doubt and fear. It’s not just about their secret and not-so-secret sexual dalliances, but also about their personal choices. It’s not feminism for the sake of feminism; it is truly about human or woman empowerment and self-esteem. They are vulnerable, and yet brave.
And all four of them – including Lisa Ray – become the character, or the character becomes them. Ditto for the male support cast, which includes Milind and Prateik. Real-life couple Fahad Samar and Simone Singh have short but important brief roles, and they leave a mark as Siddhi’s parents. Neil Bhoopalam as Anjana’s former husband; Prabal Panjabi as Siddhi's painful interest; Sameer Kochchar as the brash lying successful lawyer with a roving eye, complete the notable cast.
Nupur, Devika and dialogue writer Ishita Moitra have also pushed the limits. Yes indeed lesbians do kiss like heterosexuals do, then why not show it openly and be true to what that relationship brings with it? And yes, modern Indian women do swear and utter profanities between themselves or when they are pushed to the wall by chauvinists, so why not show them doing so? And women have their hormonal swings and periods so why not celebrate and flaunt it? Both men and women fart so why not have them portray it on screen as well?
FMSP 2.0 is a portrayal of the modern-day independent, not-so-independent and dependent Indian woman and their interplay in the society we live. And it's been done so that it is believable; while walking the fine line between kitsch and what is right. Yes, there are some clichéd moments –as well as dialogues which at times make you cringe – but have we not a lot of that in successful series emerging internationally, even Hollywood? You also often times wonder and go oh no, why can’t the complex characters of these women be simpler? Why can’t they learn and take the right decisions and not walk right into danger?
The show is packaged well, and is brightly lit, colourful and a good breeze through. In this time of COVID-19 lockdown, if you want to be entertained (without using too much of your rational and thinking faculties) by the antics of gorgeous-looking-and-dressed-to-the-T-yet-flawed women, do navigate your remote to Amazon Prime Video’s FMSP s.2.
Show: Four More Shots Please Season 2
Platform: Prime Video
Cast: Kirti Kulhari, Sayani Gupta, Baani J or Gurbaani, Maanvi Gagroo, Lisa Ray, Milind Soman, Jiya Lakhiani, Neil Bhoopalam, Prateik Babbar, Ankur Rathee, Simone Singh, Amrita Puri, Rajeev Siddhartha, Sameer Kochchar, Shibani Dandekar, Prabal Panjabi.
Director: Nupur Asthana
Written by: Devika Bhagat
Dialogues: Ishita Moitra
Show runners: Ishita and Rangita Pritish Nandy
Producer: Pritish Nandy
Editor: Antara Lahiri
Cinematography: Neha Parti Matiyani
Art Direction: Abhay Bhedasgaonkar
Production Design: Parichit Paralkar
Casting: Shubham Gaur & Trishaan
Makeup: Reann Moradian
Costume Design: Aastha Sharma, Shiraz Siddique and Sagar Tiroltkar
Music: Mikey McCleary
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
