By Arun Upadhayay 
Mumbai, May 9: There is a photograph going around on social media since Thursday morning. The Mishra family, standing together, the same familiar faces almost. Something feels slightly different. And if you have been watching Gullak since 2019, you noticed it before you could even put it into words.
Annu Bhaiya is there. But it is not him.
That single image, posted by TVF and SonyLIV as the announcement of Gullak Season 5, has done what no high-concept OTT thriller managed to do this year. It cracked open a national conversation not about plot leaks or release dates, but about something much more personal. About what it means when a character you have grown up with suddenly looks different. Speaks differently. Is someone else entirely.
The caption read: “Aisa lag raha hai Mishra nivaas mein kuch badal gaya hai Aapko bhi Samajh aaraha hai kya?” The internet understood. And it had a lot of feelings about it.
Seven Years With the Mishras
Before getting to the casting storm, it is worth pausing on what Gullak actually built over these years, because without that context, the reaction looks like overreaction. It is not.
When the show first arrived on SonyLIV in 2019, it was not marketed as anything especially ambitious. A middle-class family in small-town Uttar Pradesh. A father who fumes. A mother who holds everything together and pretends she is not doing it. Two sons trying to figure out how to be adults while still needing their parents more than they would ever admit. A piggy bank that narrates all of it in a voice warm enough to make you feel like someone left a lamp on for you.
What Shreyansh Pandey built with TVF was not entertainment in the conventional sense. It was recognition. The kind where you watch a scene and think that argument happened in my house. That silence at the dinner table. That moment when your father said something clumsy and meant it as love.
Gullak survived three seasons and came back for a fourth in June 2024 without losing that quality. Season 4 followed Aman Mishra through the difficult stretch of late adolescence the quiet rebellion, the first real taste of independence, the way he began to drift and then, slowly, came back. It ended on a note of fragile hope. The kind Gullak does best.
Through all of it, Vaibhav Raj Gupta’s Annu was the constant. Not the loudest character, not the most dramatic, but the one who grounded the sibling relationship. Clumsy with ambition, stubborn about small things, fiercely protective underneath all the bluster. Four seasons of that and audiences stopped seeing a performance. They just saw Annu Bhaiya.
The Exit That Was Coming
The news of Vaibhav Raj Gupta’s departure did not appear out of nowhere. As per reports that surfaced in September 2025, there had been creative differences between Gupta and TVF’s team over how his character should be handled in the new season. An insider was quoted by Mid-Day at the time saying that “Vaibhav and The Viral Fever’s team had a fruitful partnership for four seasons but they had creative disagreements pertaining to the fifth.” Neither side said much more than that publicly.
Harsh Mayar, who plays Aman, was one of the few people connected to the show who acknowledged what everyone already suspected. He told Zoom in an interview that went quietly viral, “Everybody knows that he is not there. And that is a very sad part. I don’t know why it happened. And it is going to be very heartbreaking for everybody who watches Gullak.”
That kind of candour from a castmate is telling. It did not read like a managed PR answer. It read like someone who genuinely missed his scene partner and did not know how to pretend otherwise.
Who Takes the Chair
The man stepping into what is arguably the most emotionally loaded recasting in Indian OTT recent memory is Anant V Joshi. You may know him from 12th Fail, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 2023 film, where he played with exactly the kind of restraint and lived-in naturalism that Gullak demands from everyone in its cast.
He is not a wrong choice. That much is worth saying clearly. Joshi is a serious actor with real range, and the creative team at TVF does not make careless decisions. The fact that they waited this long, explored options through late 2025, and landed on him rather than a bigger name suggests they were looking for fit over profile.
The casting of Anant V Joshi signals a shift in the narrative arc of Annu Mishra, with the upcoming season expected to explore a more mature phase of the character’s life. That is the production line, and it makes sense. If Season 5 picks up with Annu in a different stage of life more settled, or perhaps more lost in a different way a fresh face could actually serve the story rather than fighting against it.
The problem is not really about talent. It never was. It is about memory.
What the Fans Are Actually Saying
The comments section under the official announcement post became, within hours, one of the more honest pieces of fan writing you will read anywhere this week. People were not being irrational. They were being specific.
One comment read, “No doubt Anant V Joshi is a fab actor but Annu Bhaiya is total emotion. Annu bhaiya ke bina series middle class types relatable hi nahi lagegi.” Another simply said, “How can you change the actor after 4 seasons? We will miss old wale Annu Bhaiyya.”
That last line carries weight. Not just sentiment weight. Because what fans are naming, even if they are not using this language, is the collapse of continuity. In a show where the entire emotional logic depends on accumulated time years of watching the same people age slightly, argue the same arguments slightly differently, grow in ways that feel earned recasting a central character is not a casting decision. It is a break in the story’s internal logic.
Some welcomed the change. A section of the audience noted that Joshi’s work in 12th Fail showed exactly the kind of understated realism Gullak needs, and that a new energy might be what the fifth season requires. That argument is not without merit either.
The Rest of the Family Is Intact
What helps, significantly, is that everything else about Mishra Niwas remains in place. Jameel Khan returns as Santosh Mishra gruff, occasionally infuriating, deeply decent. Geetanjali Kulkarni is back as Shanti, which is probably the single most reassuring piece of news in the entire announcement. Harsh Mayar continues as Aman. Sunita Rajwar as Bittu Ki Mummy and Shivankit Singh Parihar as the voice of the Gullak piggy bank are also expected back in their supporting roles.
The bones of the show are there. The question is whether the new Annu can find a way into the space without the audience spending every scene measuring him against the man he replaced.
What Season 5 Actually Has to Deal With
Narratively, Season 5 inherits some interesting threads. The Mishra family moved to a new apartment by the end of Season 4 a significant change for a show whose physical setting, the old house, the familiar walls, the cramped rooms was practically a character in itself. New apartment, new dynamics, new son. That is a lot of new for a show whose entire power comes from the familiar.
Aman, based on what the teaser and early cast announcements suggest, is expected to be the emotional centre this season. A more grown-up Aman, confident in a way that throws his father slightly that is territory rich with possibility for Jameel Khan and Harsh Mayar to work in.
Still, the Annu thread will define the season’s reception more than anything else. Audiences may eventually accept Anant V Joshi. They might even love him in the role, two or three episodes in, once they stop bracing for difference and start watching what is actually there. That has happened before in long-running shows. It is not impossible.
For now, no specific release date has been confirmed. SonyLIV has the season on its calendar for 2026, and given TVF’s post-production timelines, a second half of the year premiere seems the most likely window.
The piggy bank is being reopened. Some of its memories look different now. But then, that is the thing about Gullak as a show, and as a metaphor. You keep dropping coins in, even when the shape of the opening changes. Because the family is still there. The house still smells the same. And somewhere inside, all those old moments are still rattling around, waiting to surface.
Whether this new season earns its place alongside the others that is a question only the writing and the performances can answer. And for a show that has rarely let its audience down, that is probably enough reason to wait.
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- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
Ayesha Khan