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Cast: Neena Gupta, Deven Bhojani, Arjun Bijlani, Helly Shah, Amyra Dastur, Anant Vijay, Sumeet Raghavan, Manasi Parekh, Sumeet Vyas, Sandeepa Dhar, Delnaz Irani & others
Creator: Jamnadas Majethia
Director: Atish Kapadia
Streaming On: Netflix
Language: Hindi
Runtime: 8 Episodes of 40 minutes each
Remember the early 2000s when your dinner time was fixed with one companion. It would be one show from the team of Atish Kapadia and JD Majethia – the stalwarts who ruled the Indian Television with their beautiful dramedies! Right from Sarabhai VS Sarabhai to Khichdi, and Baa Bahu Aur Baby to Wagle Ki Duniya, this beautiful teamwork worked brilliantly to make our comic appetites full and our hearts hale and hearty with all the fun and the laughter! None of the comedy was absurd and cringeworthy! And honestly, I still run through episodes of Baa Bahu Aur Baby and Sarabhai VS Sarabhai along with my dinner plate! It is that routine that one is used to! So, I expected a blast when the same team promised me Chumbak on Netflix!
To be honest, when the show started, I felt like it was scattered, melodramatic, and unnecessarily trying to be funny! However, this is one show that rewards its audience, only if you have the patience to put your trust in it! Initially, the show feels scattered, but once Neena Gupta and Deven Bhojani take the center stage, all of it comes together. Although you don’t feel like getting rolling in laughter, you will have fun, and you will connect with the warmth for sure!
Chumbak Review: What’s It About:
The story of Chumbak has a very similar and predictable palette. There are five families living in a society called Chumbak in Chembur! There are four middle-aged couples played by Arjun Bijlani-Helly Shah, Sumeet Raghavan-Sandeepa Dhar, Anant Vijay-Amyra Dastur, Sumeet Vyas-Manasi Parekh, and all of them are connected to one elderly couple in the society – Neena Gupta and Deven Bhojani. This neighborhood has no concept of privacy, so everyone is practically living together. Just like the old times! Remember GokulDham Society from Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah? This is the same colony, only a little bit more sophisticated!
So, this family of five couples is hooked together to resolve the issue of the eldest one, Neena Gupta and Deven Bhojani, as Mrs. Rajni Desai wants to divorce her husband, Kuku Uncle, as he is falling into dementia! Rajni wants to shoulder the responsibility but is tired of being the mother of her husband for so many years! Do the other four couples help them resolve their issues? Do the other four middle-aged couples also take any lessons from this elderly couple? Both these points form the crux of Chumbak!
Chumbak Review: What Works:
Chumbak has families crammed into a single colony, and here everybody’s business is everybody’s business. The problem with cooking a dish this familiar is that the first few spoonfuls taste exactly like something you’ve eaten before. But I would tell you to stick with it, though, much like a khichdi, as the show turns out to be simple, unglamorous comfort food.
The show initially lacks the magnetic pull and looks too dramatized until Neena Gupta and Deven Bhojani’s Rajani Aunty and Kuku Uncle hook you to a surprisingly grown-up, unresolved emotional core. Around them swirls the rest of the colony: young couples, gossiping relatives, minor domestic emergencies that escalate into full-blown neighborhood events, and the kind of everyday chaos that made Sarabhai vs Sarabhai and Khichdi comfort watch two decades ago.
Chumbak Review: Star Performance:
Neena Gupta is, predictably, the show’s anchor. She plays Rajni with a lived-in exhaustion that never tips into bitterness. You believe both that she loves this man and that she’s genuinely done being taken for granted by him, and that this duality is more than most family comedies bother to attempt with their central couple. Deven Bhojani matches her comic instincts beat for beat, and their scenes together have an easy, bickering chemistry that the show is smart enough to keep returning to. When the two of them share the frame, Chumbak stops feeling like a wide ensemble show and briefly becomes something more intimate and specific.
The rest of the ensemble – Arjun Bijlani, Helly Shah, Sumeet Vyas, Manasi Parekh, Sandeepa Dhar, Sumeet Raghavan, Amyra Dastur, and Delnaaz Irani- get their moments to shine rather than just filling out a background. The flip side of an ensemble this large is that no single supporting track gets the room to fully develop; several threads feel like they’re being set up for a longer runway than the season actually gives them. The extended cast also includes a very funny Delnaz Irani!
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Chumbak Review: What Doesn’t Work:
Aatish Kapadia’s writing is, unsurprisingly, controlled here. He tries the old trope of wordplay, but this does not plan the gigs! The flow of the show is funny, but without any puns! When the show trusts that instinct, it’s genuinely charming. Where it stumbles, at least early on, is in jokes that feel like they were written for a different decade of television – gags that lean on dated gender dynamics or broad stereotyping rather than the sharper character-driven wit. The opening episodes, in particular, ask for patience: you can sense the show finding its footing, testing which characters actually spark against each other, before it settles into a groove. The good news is that it does eventually settle — by the point Rajni and Kuku’s marital crisis starts pulling focus.
Chumbak Review: Last Words:
Kapadia directs this the way he’s directed every one of his shows before it. Theatrical, dramatic, and broad enough to play for a joint-family living room. That’s a deliberate, old-school choice, and it mostly works in the show’s favor, giving it a warmth that comedies often lack. The pacing issue is really a first-half problem: the show takes a few episodes longer than it should to decide which of its five families deserves the most screen time, and once it commits to the Rajni-Kuku arc as the emotional spine, the direction shines.
The Neena Gupta-Deven Bhojani pairing is the show’s strongest card, giving a genuine emotional plotline. The colony’s ensemble energy, once it finds its rhythm, recreates the specific comfort zone JD Majethia and Atish Kapadia’s duo has always built! The early episodes lean on dated, occasionally lazy humor that feels too old school, and patience is genuinely required here. This isn’t a show that hooks you in its first 20 minutes.
Chumbak is not a reinvention of the neighborhood-comedy formula that Kapadia and Majethia have been perfecting for years with Khichdi, Sarabhai VS Sarabhai, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s a familiar zone, though! Give it a few episodes, and it cooks into something genuinely likable once it turns into a comedy thriller, and a good one!
3.5 stars!
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