Gullak Season 5 Review: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Gullak Season 5 proves that great storytelling doesn’t need high stakes or shocking twists. With heartfelt performances, relatable family moments, and the same warmth that made audiences fall in love with the Mishras, it remains one of India’s most comforting and consistently enjoyable web series.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Platform: SonyLIV
Director: Shreyansh Pandey, Abhay Raut
Release: June 5, 2026
Cast: Jameel Khan, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Anant Joshi, Harsh Mayar
Language: Hindi
By the time a show reaches its fifth season, one of two things has usually happened. Either it has figured out a formula and started running on autopilot, giving audiences just enough of what they expect to keep the numbers going without taking any real risks. Or it has found something deeper — a genuine understanding of its own characters — that keeps the storytelling honest even when the situations become familiar. Gullak, against most reasonable expectations, belongs to that second category. Season 5 arrives on SonyLIV and does what this show has consistently done since it began: it makes you feel like you are visiting people you actually know.
The Mishra family of Shahdara — father Santosh, mother Shanti, and their two sons — are back at Mishra Nivas, and life, as always, has not exactly been standing still. The season introduces a new chapter with Shanti’s brother Pinky arriving for a visit, which shifts the household dynamics in ways both comedic and unexpectedly tender. It also marks the arrival of Anant Joshi in the role of Annu Mishra, stepping into a show that has an unusually devoted audience and navigating that pressure with admirable ease. He fits the world without disrupting it, which is the right instinct entirely.
Geetanjali Kulkarni, as Shanti, continues to be the quiet engine of the entire series. There is a reason critics keep singling her out season after season — she does something that is genuinely difficult to articulate but impossible to miss. She makes Shanti completely real. Not real in the way of a great performance being recognised for its technique, but real in the way that your mother or your aunt is real. Familiar and exasperating and deeply loving all at once, all in the same breath. Her comedic timing is immaculate, but what lands harder are the small moments — a look, a pause, the way she absorbs something and decides not to say it out loud. In a show full of strong work, she is the one who consistently makes you feel something you were not expecting to feel.
Jameel Khan as Santosh Mishra holds the other end. His Santosh is the kind of man who says the wrong thing with complete sincerity and means well with almost everything he does wrong. The husband-wife dynamic between Santosh and Shanti has always been the emotional spine of the show, and Season 5 finds new angles within a relationship the audience thinks it already knows completely. That is harder to write than it looks. Harsh Mayar returns with the same natural ease that has made his character feel genuinely grown-up compared to where he started.
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The new season carries a slight awareness of its own history that previous seasons did not need to manage. After five seasons, the show understands that the audience has a deep attachment to these characters, and there are moments where it leans into that attachment a little more deliberately than it might have in earlier years. Whether that constitutes over-familiarity or earned emotional shorthand probably depends on how long you have been watching. Critics who have followed the show since the beginning will notice it. Newer viewers almost certainly will not.
What remains unchanged — and what continues to separate Gullak from almost every other slice-of-life Indian drama — is the specificity of the writing. The arguments are about things that actually matter to real families. The jokes land because they come from recognisable places. The sentimentality is always earned rather than manufactured. The show understands that ordinary life, observed closely enough, contains everything a story needs.
Five seasons. Same family. Same house. Still the warmest show on Indian OTT.
Gullak Season 5 is now streaming on SonyLIV.
Flickonclick Verdict: It may not reinvent the formula, but it refines it beautifully. Funny, emotional, and deeply human, this is another worthy addition to one of Indian OTT’s finest family dramas.