Netflix’s new Hindi comedy-drama Chumbak has been striking a very specific nostalgic chord with viewers — and it’s not by accident. The show comes from the same creative team behind two of Indian television’s most beloved sitcoms, and it’s leaning hard into that legacy.
Chumbak, meaning “magnet” in Hindi, premiered on Netflix on September 10, 2026. Written and directed by Aatish Kapadia and produced by Jamnadas “JD” Majethia, the series is set in the real, century-old Mumbai neighbourhood of Chembur, reimagined as the fictional “Chumbak Colony.” It follows five multigenerational families living in a row of houses whose lives become so intertwined that neighbours function like an extended, unofficial family unit.
The ensemble cast includes Neena Gupta, Sandeepa Dhar, Manasi Parekh, Helly Shah, Amyra Dastur, Sumeet Vyas, Anant Joshi, Arjun Bijlani, Deven Bhojani, Delnaaz Irani, Sumeet Raghavan, and Atul Kumar. Early episodes follow a woman named Rajni whose husband Kuku goes missing, setting off a chain of chaotic neighbourhood involvement that eventually surfaces cracks in her marriage — the kind of everyday-domestic-drama-turned-comedy that defines the show’s tone.
Why it feels like a throwback
The nostalgia isn’t incidental — it’s the whole pitch. Kapadia and Majethia run Hats Off Productions, the company behind Khichdi and Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, two shows widely considered classics of Indian sitcom television. In describing Chumbak, the creators have called it a deliberate tribute to nostalgia, exploring how family bonds can form outside blood ties, becoming as sturdy as the “char diwaari” — the four walls — of a shared home. They’ve said they wanted to celebrate something audiences have experienced but perhaps stopped appreciating: the chaotic warmth of old neighbourhoods where nobody needs an invitation to walk into someone else’s house.
That’s precisely the emotional register that made Khichdi and Baa Bahoo Aur Baby — another Hats Off production — so enduring: exaggerated but warm family chaos, quarrelsome-but-loving relatives, and comedy built from mundane domestic friction rather than high-concept plotting. Helly Shah and Anant Joshi, who previously worked together on Gullak 5, add another layer of that comfort-television lineage to the cast.
Critic Deepa Gahlot, writing for Rediff.com, described the show as an old-style sitcom with its own particular charm — a framing that’s been echoed across early reviews, which largely position Chumbak less as an innovation and more as a warm return to a format Indian audiences grew up on.
The bigger picture
Chumbak marks something of a shift for Netflix India, which has typically leaned on film directors like Anurag Kashyap and Imtiaz Ali to lend prestige to its original series. With Chumbak, the streamer instead turned to a team with decades of pure television sitcom experience — a bet that the comfort and familiarity of old-school family comedy has its own audience pull, especially among viewers who grew up on Doordarshan and early cable-era sitcoms and are now watching on a streaming platform with their own families.
The show currently has 16 episodes in its first season, each running around 28-30 minutes — again, sitcom-length and sitcom-paced, rather than the hour-long streaming drama format that’s become the norm.
