BOTTOM LINE
Substandard Sitcom, Hardly Watchable
PLATFORM
Netflix
RUNTIME
3 Hours(8 Episodes)
What Is the Show About?
Five quirky families in Chumbak Colony deal with chaotic conflicts and hilarious antics as neighbours. An elderly couple, Rajni and Kuku, decide to divorce, creating ripples through the neighbourhood. From court agreements and secret affairs to unexpected runaways, their everyday life becomes a series of crises as the couples confront challenges in their relationships.
Performances
Neena Gupta and Sumeet Vyas keep the tone of their performances in check amidst the chaos. They don’t try to oversell the characters or the writing and manage to hold fort. Anant Joshi’s flair for humour comes to the fore occasionally, while Sandeepa Dhar, Amyra Dastur and Arjun Bijilani pass muster. Manasi Parekh is strictly okay. Helly Shah, Sumeet Raghavan, Delnaaz Irani and Deven Bhojani go quite overboard in shallow roles.
Analysis
It’s disappointing that whenever a project is tailored for mass consumption, it immediately translates to dumbing-down content, regardless of the genre. Netflix has been consciously making rapid strides to widen its Indian viewer base with its recent content slate. It has come at the cost of the platform gradually losing its distinctive edge as an avenue for edgy storytelling.
Not every story is meant to break new ground or be an edge-of-the-seat experience. Everything boils down to a simple question. Did you have fun? With Chumbak, it is a big no. Like many recent Hindi films, it unfolds in a secluded setting where the hyper-exaggerated characters and situations are stripped of reality. Audiences are taken for a ride in a desperate pursuit of laughs.
The show is set in an elite bubble that practically functions like an urban village, where everyone is nosy and equally curious about the other person’s life. Rajni opines she’s more a mother to her demented husband, Kuku, than a wife. She seeks a divorce from him, not to throw him away from home, but to live for herself. Chaos ensues when the husband goes missing one night.
Another subplot has a man who cross-dresses as a woman for his comedy career, making him both the mama and papa of the house. Another man, a doctor, wears his wife’s panties to work. His counterpart nearly gets caught with his mistress by a forgetful Kuku as they are about to make love in a bathtub. Elsewhere, a woman laments the death of a python and hosts a memorial too.
When a child and his parents have a serious argument over poor grades at school, the son breaks into a rap number to showcase his musical ambitions. When that response falls flat, he approaches a lawyer to follow his passion. As a father-in-law asks an assistant to fetch his reading glasses, he serves a series of glasses for drinks.
Chumbak relentlessly shifts from one absurd situation to another in the hands of a team that has little clue about comedy. The westernised aesthetic and approach to screwball humour with supposedly desi characters fall flat. The dialogues, situations and acting are hardly in sync. While it doesn’t take itself too seriously, the deadpan style is barely relatable and too outlandish to be funny.
This is a byproduct of an entertainment industry that tries to manufacture comedy out of a vacuum, corporatised, with no personal voice or sensibility that’s quintessentially desi. Bright set pieces, vibrant costumes, and diligent styling cannot fill that void. The characters, their conversations, the places they live in, and the situations they find themselves caught in, simply make no sense.
Chumbak tries to pass off sophisticated absurdity as humour, and the result is a hardly tolerable cacophony.
Music and Other Departments?
An immediate reason for the viewer disconnect, apart from the acting and writing, is the artificiality of the set design, costumes and the lifeless backdrop. It’s neither appealing nor identifiable. The music score deliberately tries to make up for the poor writing and amplify the impact of the toothless dialogues and retorts. The editing is for damage control mainly, figuring out how far you can guard a show in disarray and make it somewhat watchable. One can empathise with the technician’s plight.
Highlights?
Few situations, dialogues
The idea of a comedy around a divorced elderly couple
Drawbacks?
Silly and unfunny most of the time
Mediocre performances, writing
Hardly relatable, too westernised in its approach
Did I Enjoy It?
No
Will You Recommend It?
Not at all.
Chumbak Netflix Series Reviewed by M9 News
