✒️Sneha Jaiswal (X | Insta) 🎧 Prefer listening? Short audio review embedded below.
Written and directed by Aatish Kapadia, Netflix comedy Chumbak has a very talented ensemble cast and a mildly funny script, following five families living in an upmarket Mumbai residential society of row houses called Chumbak Colony.
Interestingly, this comedy unfolds through flashbacks, with Hutoxi Taraporewala (Amyra Dastur) reading chapters from her debut book, Chumbak Chapters, about her friendly neighbours and their many domestic troubles. It all begins when their beloved Rajni aunty (Neena Gupta) decides to divorce her husband, Kuku Merchant (Deven Bhojani), because he can never remember her name correctly, disappears without warning, and she no longer wants to play mother to her partner.
Rajni aunty’s decision comically forces all the couples to take a closer look at their own marriages. The women rally around Rajni, even throwing her a Bollywood-themed party to celebrate her bold new step, while the men try to be there for Kuku uncle, and for each other.
Sumeet Raghavan plays their neighbour Dharmendra Kejriwal, a famous comedian married to flight attendant Kiran (Sandipa Dhar), who still can’t quite get used to seeing her husband constantly dressed in women’s clothes. That’s his signature gag on a popular comedy show that’s very obviously meant to be a Kapil Sharma Show-style knock-off. Sumeet Raghavan is definitely hilarious throughout the show as he cavorts around in sarees, gowns, and increasingly over-the-top female costumes.
Like most ensemble comedies, Chumbak of course has its rich, dumb daddy’s-little-girl character. Here, that’s Twinkle Oberoi (Helly Shah), a popular model whose IQ is roughly proportional to the water levels of a desert in summer. She’s married to surgeon Micky Oberoi (Arjun Bijlani), and while almost any other Indian father-in-law would be incredibly proud to have a doctor join the family, Twinkle’s father, Nari Ravjiani (Atul Kumar), absolutely hates Micky and is constantly looking for an opportunity to murder him.
Anant Vijay Joshi plays Hutoxi’s Parsi husband Freddy, a home chef, caterer, and total mama’s boy. The biggest problem in their marriage is therefore Freddy’s testy mother Gulshan (Delnaaz Irani), who constantly mocks Hutoxi, although her daughter-in-law is more than capable of firing back with equally nasty insults.
The fifth family is the Khannas. Priyanka Khanna (Manasi Parekh) is a nonstop chatterbox with absolutely zero chill, ready to argue with anybody and everybody. Her husband, meanwhile, is the calm and composed Aditya (Sumeet Vyas), an advertising executive and, frankly, probably the most underdeveloped character in the show.
What I really enjoyed about Chumbak is just how unrealistically close these five families are… and I say unrealistically because they’re all pretty wealthy, living in posh houses that look like they belong in Architectural Digest. Yet the show gives them the kind of close-knit, communal neighbourhood dynamic you’d normally associate with a very different kind of Mumbai housing society, where everybody knows everybody else’s business and dropping into your neighbour’s home apparently requires neither an invitation nor a doorbell.
Basically, they have celebrity style homes but the social boundaries of neighbours who’ve been sharing the same corridor for 30 years. It’s a funny combination, but also a slightly odd one. Chumbak wants the warmth and relatability of a middle-class neighbourhood comedy while surrounding its characters with lifestyles that feel anything but relatable. Their homes are way spacious for Mumbai, the interiors are gorgeous, everyone is impeccably dressed, and money rarely seems to be much of a concern. There’s of course nothing wrong with making a sitcom about wealthy people, but the show comes across as being confused about exactly what social world it wants these characters to inhabit.
The cast does its best to sell the jokes, many work, while others feel like they’ve been dusted off from a sitcom written 20 years ago. Take the Parsi stereotypes, for instance. Delnaaz Irani is super-cute as the constantly dikra-spouting Gulshan and largely gets away with the caricature because she’s older. But did her son really need the exaggerated, old-school Parsi accent too? Thankfully, the show doesn’t extend the gag to Hutoxi, who simply talks like a regular big-city woman.
Deven Bhojani is instantly kooky and adorable as Kuku uncle, a former commercial pilot who was fired for landing a plane in the wrong city. But as a Neena Gupta fan, I couldn’t help thinking this would’ve been a great opportunity to cast her opposite Gajraj Rao. Deven Bhojani despite touching 60, still has a youthful charm, so his Kuku doesn’t look one bit older than Rajni, and his grey wig looks atrociously fake (perhaps deliberately so). Frankly, I’d have an easier time believing Kuku is in his 40s than a man in his late 60s/early 70s who’s losing his memory.
Visually, though, there’s little to complain about. This certainly doesn’t look like your average Hindi sitcom working around budget constraints. The sets are snazzy, and if anything, Chumbak looks like a well-produced comedy movie chopped up into smaller parts. If only the writing department had received the same upgrade. Also, maybe having 10 primary characters was pushing things a bit, because you constantly feel like nobody gets enough screen time. Then again, if they’re planning multiple seasons, a large cast like this could eventually make things more fun, with plenty of characters and relationships to explore. Although, given how uneven the pacing is right now, I’m not entirely convinced Chumbak will live long enough to celebrate its 100th episode.
In the end, at least ‘Chumbak’ is a far cry from those Hindi shows where a single dramatic reaction is shown from 10 different angles for what feels like five minutes. Nor is it the kind of comedy that relies on sexual innuendos (or worse, potty jokes) to squeeze a laugh out of viewers. The humour here is mostly clean and good-natured.
Overall, Chumbak is a decent one-time watch, constantly swinging between laugh-out-loud moments and stretches where you might find yourself wondering if the creators forgot this show is supposed to be a comedy. The cast is doing most of the heavy lifting, and while I doubt I’ll remember much of the show a few months from now, I had a reasonably good time watching it. Brownie points just for the cast.
Stream ‘Chumbak’ on Netflix.
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