Second Life

Nobody guaranteed a second season of We Are Lady Parts, the British series about a London punk band made up of young Muslim women. The first season, featured on Peacock, earned rave reviews and a Peabody award. The fresh, funny, uplifting and, yes, rockin’ show proved writer/director Nida Manzoor as not only a brilliant writer able to build a whole world in six short episodes, but as a great director of charismatic actors. It doesn’t hurt that she also helped generate a fantastic original soundtrack of catchy-ass songs.

In the meantime since that 2021 debut season, Manzoor directed the also-excellent movie Polite Society about an aspiring young stuntwoman. That movie’s success made it hard to believe that Manzoor would return to television rather than build on her budding career as an indie film auteur.

Lucky us. Manzoor’s show returns for a second season and the result is six near-perfect episodes of well-drawn characters, Edgar Wright-like flights of fantasy fancy, and a leveling up in the complexity of the writing, the filmmaking, and even the songs.

When last we left the bandmembers of the punk quartet, Amina (Anjana Vasan) gained the confidence she needed to be the band’s lead guitarist (without puking out her guts), and the band was starting to gain a local following.

The new season follows their rise much further as frontwoman Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey) decides the band’s bangers including Bashir With the Good Beard and Voldemort Under My Headscarf must be immortalized with an album. But Lady Parts aren’t making enough money to do that despite the best efforts of manager Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse) and the band’s rehearsal space where Saira lives is lost to gentrification. They’re also victims of their own success as fans start to copy their songs (or cover in homage, depending on how you view things) and make money on material the band itself can’t monetize.

That’s only the beginning of a season that also pushes forward drummer Ayesha’s (Juliette Motamed) coming-out/or not coming-out story, Bisma’s grappling with some of the complications of being a Black Muslim woman, and Momtaz exploring aspirations beyond being one band’s manager. Amina, entering her “Villain Era” as a workplace badass, is still in a romantic something with Ahsan (Zaqi Ismail), but she’s less in the constant foreground as the show turns into an ensemble showcase.

That’s both a blessing and a curse; Manzoor displays great skill at giving every character, even minor ones, agency and complexity. That means the new season sometimes feels overstuffed with a lot of storylines that don’t all pay off equally. But the showrunner also demonstrates a seamless economy of storytelling. By the time the six-episode season concludes, so much has happened that it’s hard to believe the runtime was so short. We Are Lady Parts concludes on such a satisfying vibe that if this is all the show we’re ever going to get, it’s all right.

Apart from the individual dramas (told in the context of very funny dialogue and visual jokes), the overall arc is the band’s grappling with fandom culture, with navigating a music industry that may only tokenize them as “funny Muslim song” purveyors instead of serious artists, and with deciding what they ultimately want the message of their music to be, if anything beyond their own relatable life experiences.

As with the first season, the plotlines inform the songs, from the premiere episode’s staggeringly good Villain Era to the cowgirl hype-song Malala Made Me Do It, featuring the actual Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai on horseback. Even a wedding-band cover of Oops!… I Did It Again does the work of showing why the fictional band’s fans love them in the show and why the idea of Lady Parts breaking through as a huge act in England with tons of Stans seems so plausible.

If Season One benefited from good buzz for its representation of a point of view we haven’t seen before — Muslim women pursuing their passion without the trope that they must escape their faith to do so — Season Two adds more shading by showing more intersectionality and complexity happening within those lives. The show foregrounds Muslim women, but it also does not portray its male Muslim characters as abusers or obstacles, a significant distinction from other pop-culture portrayals of the culture. Amina’s love interest as well as her father, Bisma’s husband, and even the producer who works on their debut album, Dirty Mahmood, all support the music and these women. If there’s a villain on the show, it’s society’s expectations and prejudices as well as the bandmembers’ own anxieties about being role models and spokeswomen within and beyond their Muslim communities.

That sounds really heavy, and at times, We Are Lady Parts does go deep. But it’s never very long before the band is enthusiastically singing 500 Miles in the car together or blasting out a new on-point tune to frenzied fans. We Are Lady Parts above all else is joyous and a great hang. You grow to love these characters, their music, and everything the show does right.