For Fans of Gullak

The show's genius is to make you care enormously about whether the father gets the government contract or the mother convinces the elder son to call more often. These are not plot points; they are the actual substance of most lives. Indian television had long assumed audiences required tragedy or spectacle. Gullak quietly disagreed, and the numbers proved it right.

Venba places you inside an immigrant Tamil mother's kitchen, reconstructing recipes from a water-damaged cookbook as a way of staying connected to a culture her son is growing away from. The emotion is completely Gullak-adjacent: love expressed through food and routine, generational gaps that are never anyone's fault, and the impossibility of explaining what is being lost. It is two hours long and it lands harder than most eight-hour series.

Set in a Seoul alley in the late 1980s, Reply 1988 follows five families so closely that their shared courtyard feels like a character. The fathers are bumbling and devoted; the mothers are pragmatic and quietly heroic; the children are navigating ambition and friendship with no map. The pacing is identical to Gullak's: unhurried, digressive, and deeply confident that small moments accumulate into something profound.

What makes Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur's exchange of letters in The Lunchbox so painful is the same thing that makes Gullak work: both understand that loneliness does not require catastrophe. It grows inside perfectly functional households and perfectly adequate lives. The film trusts its audience with an ending that refuses comfort, which is the mark of the same storytelling seriousness.