How do you review last-gen media? Watching Chumbak is a bit like watching your parents, grandparents and assorted relatives put on a play: you nod encouragingly, laugh at the one-liners (if they’re good), and, when no one's looking, merrily go back to scrolling your phone. The show and its makers expect no better. These, after all, were the unassuming standards set by broadcast TV — by benign yet brain-scrambling sitcoms like Khichdi, Sarabhai vs Sarabhai and Baa Bahoo Aur Baby. This is a throwback to those times. That Chumbak is one of the top shows on Netflix India, in 2026, is revealing. The TV-fication of Indian streaming is complete.
One nice thing about Chumbak is the knowledge that Jamnadas Majethia, Aatish Kapadia, Devesh Bhojani and Sumeet Raghavan are all alive and well. Bhojani — a polite, portly trouper of the small screen — last appeared in Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya, and before that in Black, White & Gray - Love Kills and Scoop, but this is his true terrain. The series centres on the oddball residents of a wealthy row house colony in Mumbai (strangely, the locality of choice, Chembur, adds absolutely zilch to the specificity of the show. Really, not even an Anil Kapoor reference). The first eight episodes of the first season streamed in early September, with loose plots spun around missing husbands, impending divorces and deceased pet snakes. The remaining eight episodes present further variations on the singular theme of silly.
The characters are little more than cartoons. Bhojani and Neena Gupta play an elderly couple who have recently obtained divorce, but, out of mutual kindness, continue to live together. A perfect marriage, in other words. There’s a stock Parsi couple with a resentful mother-in-law (played by the fearsome Delnaaz Irani). Sumeet Vyas plays a mild-mannered man with two school-going sons and a motormouth wife. I warmed most to Raghavan’s Dharmendra, a television actor with a butch name who — much like Ali Asgar — is forever seen in women’s outfits. A new mid-season addition is Rohit Roy, in leather jacket and shades, and the in-joke, I suppose, is that his character is named Ronit Roy, who is Rohit’s real-life brother.
Chumbak embraces silliness like it’s the world’s last tree. After a few episodes, the bottom-feeding energy is infectious. The assault of wordplay is relentless. I found my straight face caving at "Kheera-Mandi", a play on the high-flown Sanjay Leela Bhansali series Heeramandi. An ancient device in comedic writing is literalism — a character says something, and someone else latches on (funnily) to the literal meaning of the words. The device tends to work when there is a particularly dense character in a gang of goofs — a first among equals. The problem with Chumbak is that everyone on screen is uniformly, democratically slow on the uptake. The result is a brand of comedy where everyone’s slipping on verbal banana peels. The laugher and the laughed-at switch places constantly, muddying the impact.
It’s eight hours of shrieky, screwy, scaba-dabba-doo slapstick. No fruit hangs too low in this garden of gags. "She's my Twitter wife," says Bhojani. "I mean, my 'X' wife". At some point, all residents of Chumbak colony find themselves on truth pills, the closest thing this PG show comes to a drug freak-out. Amid the chaos, Majhethia — as co-writer and co-creator — finds pockets of feeling and progressiveness. It’s touching to see him engage, in his bumbling, harebrained way, with contemporary concerns like helicopter parenting and grey divorces. I genuinely wanted to know more about Dharmendra’s mental state, after a lifetime of acting in drag, something the show keeps returning to in drips and drabs.
It’s hard to begrudge the existence of a show like Chumbak: the finger-food of casual entertainment. One might as well ban chakli. If nothing else, it makes a great case for the dignity of labour. Talented actors like Neena Gupta, Atul Kumar, Anant Joshi and Sumeet Vyas disport themselves at the altar of multi-cam stupidity. If this indeed is the future of television —which, ironically, is also its past — at least the right people are getting paid. As Gupta observes, with a dignified shrug, “If you can’t win them, join them.”