We Are Lady Parts -- Pure Punk Poetry

A sitcom featuring a young, female Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering who becomes the lead guitarist for an all women fem-core Muslim punk band in London -- that is the pitch, and I absolutely loved it from the opening three-chord downstroke. 

We Are Lady Parts (wow, what a title), a British TV show from creator Nida Manzoor, is an incredibly unique and innovative piece of television with clever writing, smart social commentary, witty quips, tight filming, and some truly kick-ass music. Having finished up its second season, and only available for streaming on Peacock, Lady Parts was so intriguing to me, I was willing to sign up for the channel just to check it out. 

It did not disappoint. 

Amina Hussain. 26. Capricorn. Finishing a PhD in microbiology. Prone to excessive sweating, secret American folk-guitar-playing in her wardrobe, and husband-finding. Desperately seeking a nice Muslim boy with eyebrows you can hang on to. No, strike that! What she wants is to join an all-female, Muslim, post-punk band called Lady Parts. Truly, this is the British-Asian comedy series you’ve been waiting for your whole representation-starved life. And yes, I am addressing my own young self here.

We Are Lady Parts is a rowdy, spoofy, extremely silly and surprisingly sweet Channel 4 sitcom written, directed and produced by Nida Manzoor (Doctor Who, Enterprice). Her first series deserves to secure her reputation as a rising star. To put it as bluntly as one of Lady Parts’ songs (such as Nobody’s Gonna Honour Kill My Sister But Me), we have not seen anything like this on mainstream British TV: a comedy in which Muslim women are permitted to be funny, sexual, ridiculous, religious, angry, conflicted. Themselves, basically.

There is truly "nothing on TV like 'We Are Lady Parts.'"

When I sat down to watch the first season a little over two years ago, I was expecting to be amused, perhaps charmed. And there is certainly a whole lot of subversive humor in the series, which was created by the British Pakistani writer-director Nida Manzoor. Two of the first songs we hear Lady Parts perform are “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister but Me” and “Voldemort Under My Headscarf”; a rival Muslim punk band introduced in Season 2 is called Second Wife. But We Are Lady Parts is so much more than a collection of jokes about the absurdities that young Muslim women often encounter. By turns raucous and earnest, the series is unlike anything else on TV right now—in part because it doesn’t consider representation to be a worthy end goal of its own. Instead, the show allows its characters to riff on their identities in ways that reflect how young people actually talk to one another, without becoming didactic or self-serious.