Gullak Season 5 Review: Still Warm, Still Honest — But Does the Mishra Family Magic Hold Up?

Gullak Season 5 is streaming now. Seven episodes, the same Mishra family — but does it still feel like home? Read our full review before you hit play.

Table of Contents
What Is Gullak Season 5 About?
What’s New With the Mishra Family?
Does Gullak Season 5 Still Work?
Performances: Who Stands Out?
Writing and Direction: Where It Holds, Where It Slips
Should You Watch Gullak Season 5?

Gullak Season 5 Review: The Mishra Family Is Back — Familiar, Flawed, and Still Worth Your Weekend
Seven years. Five seasons. And somehow, the Mishra family still feels like your neighbors.
That is not a small thing. Most Indian web series burn bright for a season or two and then quietly run out of things to say. Gullak has managed to keep going — not by reinventing itself, but by trusting that the ordinary life of a middle-class family in a small north Indian town is enough. It usually is.
Season 5 dropped with seven new episodes, and if you have been watching since 2019, you already know the rhythm. Santosh Mishra will say something that makes you laugh and ache at the same time. Shanti will hold everything together without anyone noticing. The boys will be figuring themselves out. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the show will sneak in a line that sticks with you for days.
The question this time is whether Season 5 earns its place alongside the first four — or whether the seams are starting to show.

What Is Gullak Season 5 About — The Story So Far
The season opens with the Mishra house getting a fresh coat of paint. It is a small, telling detail: the color does not change, the house looks more or less the same, and nobody is quite sure anything happened at all. That is Gullak in a single image.
There is a WiFi router now, which is the show’s way of saying that time is passing and even the Mishras are moving with it — slowly, reluctantly, but moving.
Santosh Mishra (Jameel Khan) is chasing a government housing scheme. Annu (Anant Joshi) is trying to grow up — he wants a promotion, he is falling harder for Dr. Preeti (Heily Shah), and he is quietly becoming someone more responsible than the older brother we first met. Aman (Harsh Mayar) has left school for college and moved to another city, and he is doing something that the family does not know about yet — something the review will not spoil here.
Shanti (Geetanjali Kulkarni) is still running the house and holding everyone together. That has not changed. What has changed is Shalini — better known to fans as Bittu ki Mummy (Sunita Rajwar) — who has reinvented herself as a blogger and the chairperson of a women’s group called Sakhi Shalini. The Mishras, predictably, are not thrilled about any of this.
There is a villain subplot this season. A love story that gets only a few minutes of screen time. A set of secrets that come out slowly. And woven through all of it, a series of social observations about inflation, unemployment, fake feminism, social media power, astrology apps, the class divide, and what it actually costs to take out a loan when you are living month to month.

Does Gullak Season 5 Actually Work?
Mostly, yes. Keeping a show this specific and this warm alive for five seasons is genuinely hard, and Gullak pulls it off well enough that you will sit through all seven episodes without much resistance.
But this season is not quite as tight as the ones before it.
The villain angle feels grafted on. It does not emerge naturally from the world of the show — it arrives, creates some friction, and then resolves in a way that feels borrowed from a different kind of series. The Mishra family’s world works because it is small and specific. When the writing reaches for something more dramatic, it loses a little of that precision.
Annu’s love story with Dr. Preeti is handled so lightly that it almost disappears. There is real potential in that relationship — the dynamic between them is interesting — but the season touches it and moves on. Viewers who were hoping to see that thread developed will feel a little shortchanged.
The bigger shift in Season 5 is tonal. The makers have leaned into emotion over comedy this time around. That is a legitimate choice, and some of it lands well. But some of the emotional beats feel pushed — moments that are clearly trying to make you feel something rather than simply letting it happen.
What the season misses most is the thing Gullak does better than almost any other Indian web series: the Mishras sitting together and just talking. The arguments, the teasing, the small cruelties and immediate forgiveness that happen when a family shares a house and cannot escape each other. Season 5 separates the characters more — different struggles, different locations, different storylines — and in doing so, loses some of that irreplaceable warmth.
There are still great lines. “You’re not their mother, that you’d work without payment” is the kind of dialogue that sounds simple and lands like a punch. There is more of that this season than the last, and it is the best version of what Gullak can be.

Gullak Season 5 Performances: Who Carries the Season?
The cast of Gullak has always been its strongest asset, and Season 5 is no different.
Jameel Khan, as Santosh Mishra, is the heart of the show in every season — and this one is no exception. Every line he delivers carries the specific weight of a man who has been quietly managing disappointment his whole life while refusing to let it show at dinner. He is the best version of every father you have known. The performance is effortless in a way that is very difficult to achieve.
Geetanjali Kulkarni is, again, remarkable for what she does not do. Shanti could easily become a martyr figure — the long-suffering wife and mother — but Kulkarni plays her with too much intelligence for that. She is aware. She sees everything. She simply chooses her battles carefully.
The biggest talking point this season will be Anant Joshi stepping into the role of Annu, replacing Vaibhav Raj Gupta. Joshi is genuinely good. The performance is confident and the character arc is handled well. But the recasting is jarring in a way that is not entirely the actor’s fault — Gullak is a show about a family, and when a family member suddenly looks different, it takes time to adjust. That discomfort does not fully go away.
Harsh Mayar’s Aman has grown up on screen, and the performance has grown with the character. Sunita Rajwar as Shalini is reliably excellent — the character is broader this season, but Rajwar makes sure it never tips into caricature. Heily Shah and Gopal Dutt both make strong impressions in limited screen time.

Writing and Direction in Gullak Season 5
The first four seasons of Gullak were helmed by three different directors — Amrit Raj Gupta for Season 1, Palash Vaswani for Seasons 2 and 3, and Shreyansh Pandey for Season 4. Season 5 is directed by Shreyansh Pandey and Abhay Raut together.
The direction is solid. The visual grammar of the show is established enough that a new director does not unsettle it. What the season could have used is sharper writing. More scenes like the paint job opening. More dialogue that does the work of social commentary without announcing itself as social commentary.
The show covers a lot of ground — gender, class, social media, debt, blind faith, the gap between aspirations and reality — and it covers most of it with honesty. The problem is density. When too many ideas compete for space in seven episodes, some of them inevitably get less room than they deserve.

Should You Watch Gullak Season 5?
Yes. Without much hesitation.
It is not the best season of Gullak. Seasons 2 and 3 remain the high point. But it is still Gullak — still the Mishras, still that middle-class texture that no other Indian show quite captures, still the odd line that makes you put your phone down and pay attention.
If you have watched the first four seasons, you are going to watch this one regardless. And you should. Block a weekend afternoon, start from Episode 1, and you will have finished all seven before you think to check the time.

Conclusion
Gullak Season 5 does not reach the heights of its best seasons, but it never stops being worth watching. The Mishra family remains one of the most believable families on Indian streaming — flawed, funny, recognizable, and deeply humane. A slightly forced villain arc and a leaner comedy quotient hold it back from being the season it could have been. But the warmth is still there, the performances are still strong, and the show still knows how to say something true about ordinary Indian life in a single line of dialogue.
That is more than most shows manage in five seasons. Gullak has earned its place in the conversation.
Streaming now on SonyLIV. Seven episodes. Directed by Shreyansh Pandey and Abhay Raut.

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