The Big Picture

Season 2 of
We Are Lady Parts
amps up the stakes, showing the band facing challenges in their journey to stardom.
The show maintains its DIY punk energy and creates a unique musical atmosphere with new tracks and covers seamlessly woven in.

We Are Lady Parts
excellently captures the weird parts of band culture, delving into fan interactions and real-life neuroses with absurd humor.

We Are Lady Parts was one of the best shows of the pandemic era, bar none. Funny, heartwarming, and totally kickass, Nida Manzoor’s series about an all-girl, Muslim punk band in London was an injection of light and hope in a time when everything seemed monochromatic and hellish, with a banger soundtrack and comedy that’ll make you fall off your couch laughing (or, potentially, cringing). It was a hidden gem on Peacock, a streamer I’d mostly written off as useful only for watching Yellowstone and The Office, and now it’s back for its sophomore season, as the band arrives back in London from a season of touring, faced with an all-new set of challenges in their journey to stardom.

While Season 1 was about the band versus themselves, trying to find their own harmony, Season 2 is Lady Parts versus the world. Sure, the stakes might matter only to them — getting a record deal, making an album, playing to bigger, better crowds — but they feel just as intense (sometimes even more so) than anything in the bigger ticket items premiering this year, when Manzoor and her cast create a world that feels like it exists just down the street from you, populated by the people you see at the corner store and on posters for local gigs that think about popping in on.

The show feels incredibly DIY, despite being broadcast on one of the biggest streamers in the US, and one of the most popular network channels in the UK. It harnesses the energy of punk, with its safety-pinned trousers and hair dyed in kitchen sinks reflected in the show pushing the boundaries of reality, piecing seemingly disparate ideas together to create a meaningful whole. But more importantly, it understands that energy, and isn’t simply using it as set dressing for a show that goes against all the real values of punk. It’s fluid and always in motion, never stopping to question why Lady Parts shouldn’t write a country song about Malala Yousafzai as a punk band, or why bassist Bisma (Faith Omole) is able to freeze time with a remote control and never once have it questioned in the show’s reality. Punk means staying true to your own vision and values, regardless of what The Man deems acceptable or good, and We Are Lady Parts fits that bill perfectly, both as a band and as a show.

We Are Lady Parts A look at the highs and lows of the band members that make up a Muslim female punk band, Lady Parts, as seen through the eyes of Amina Hussein, a geeky PhD student who is recruited to be their unlikely lead guitarist.Release Date June 3, 2021 Cast Anjana Vasan , Sarah Kameela Impey , Faith Omole , Lucie Shorthouse Main Genre Comedy Seasons 2

Manzoor created a unique voice for the show when it premiered in 2021, and it’s a delight to see that it’s just as loud and proud in Season 2, without any hint of the usual sophomore slump. Anjana Vasan’s Amina (now in her “villain era” this season) remains one of the funniest protagonists on television, and it’s a relief to see that she hasn’t backslid away from her development in Season 1 in the three-year interim since it premiered — a phenomenon that happens far too often, just to keep viewers watching. New additions Meera Syal and Lydia Leonard add just enough variety to keep things interesting, and Sarah Kameela Impey takes her place as perhaps the show’s strongest player, as lead singer Saira battles with money troubles and her own conscience as the band’s star rises.

Lady Parts Is a Killer Band All on Their Own in Season 2
Speaking of the band itself: it’s refreshing to see a show about music actually create a proper musical atmosphere for its characters and its audience, instead of simply slapping songs everyone knows over the credits and calling it a day. Normally, I’m hesitant about shows that feature full musical numbers, since they normally drift towards showtunes even if they’re meant to be rock songs, but Manzoor and her co-songwriters — Shez Manzoor, Sanya Manzoor, and Benni Fregin — don’t even dip their toe in that pond. They go full headbang this season with a host of new tracks, and while they do use a handful of pre-existing songs — including an excellent cover of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” — they work into the fabric of the show seamlessly, informing Lady Parts’ musical influences rather than isolating them as characters who simply stop and sing when sentences can no longer express their feelings.

‘We Are Lady Parts’ Nails the Weird Parts of Band Culture

It’s not just the music that Lady Parts gets right. Manzoor also has an intimate understanding of how fan culture operates, and not just in a screaming Beatlemania kind of way. No, she gets down and dirty with it, exposing the Internet’s changes to how we interact with the things and people we love, for better and for worse. Lady Parts is up against not only bands attempting to imitate them but also the people who want to connect with them, even if that means writing strange slash fanfiction about drummer Ayesha (Juliette Motamed) and Saira, something that makes the former (very rightly) uncomfortable. It’s an aspect of fan culture rarely explored beyond the depths of stan Twitter, and very intentionally a stab at Gen Z culture, who take parasocial relationships and labels for themselves to the extreme.

It’s that realism that helps balance the DIY absurdity of the new season, steeping very real, very relatable characters in the most absurd situations Manzoor could possibly dream up. She’s able to capture the comedy in real-life neuroses, the kind of mishaps that become running jokes in a group chat or get brought up in wedding speeches to lovingly embarrass someone. While they’re hilarious individually, Lady Parts as a whole isn’t a caricature of a punk band, or a group of Muslim women, or even just a group of female friends. Life is strange and weird and wonderful as much as it can be frustrating and upsetting, and the show weaves between ideas and genres to reflect all of that. Each woman is her own kind of absurd, in good ways and bad, and together, they’re the best kind of absurd — friends to the end, and ultimately, one hell of a band.

We Are Lady Parts We Are Lady Parts Season 2 lives up to the energy of the first season, bringing DIY energy to a unique and entertaining story.ProsCreator Nida Manzoor continues to build on a wonderfully creative, boundary-pushing world for the band.Anjana Vasan leads the series with hilarity and poise as two opposing forces.Manzoor and her songwriting team conjure a head-banging musical atmosphere for the series.

We Are Lady Parts Season 2 premieres on Peacock on May 30.

Watch on Peacock