Richa Chadha is putting down the script for a bit. Her new project, Musafiri, is an eight-episode non-fiction series that has her hosting, writing and producing for the first time, and it marks her first outing on YouTube proper.

The trailer dropped ahead of the show's premiere on Phull Stop, the channel Chadha runs with her husband Ali Fazal. First episode lands September 25, with a new one every Friday after that, so this is a full eight-week run, not a one-off drop.

What the show is actually about

Musafiri stays entirely inside Mumbai for its first season. And it's deliberately steering away from the postcard version of the city. No Gateway of India establishing shots as the whole pitch. Instead, Chadha spends the episodes talking to residents, historians and cultural practitioners about the parts of Mumbai that don't usually make it into a highlight reel, the overlooked neighbourhoods, the people who keep the place running, the histories nobody bothered to write down.

According to Bollywood Hungama, the idea took shape after Chadha became a mother. In the trailer, she talks about how that shifted the way she looked at things she'd stopped noticing.

"Motherhood changed the way I look at the world," Chadha said. "It makes you curious all over again, you start questioning things you have taken for granted, looking at the familiar with a completely different sense of wonder. I found myself asking so many questions about the city I have lived in for years. Do I really know Mumbai? How much of this city do I actually know? And a question that stayed with me was, a city that has given me so much, what do I owe it in return?"

There's also an older thread running through this. Chadha studied history at university, and she says that background is doing a lot of the work here.

"I have always been curious about history, art, culture and people," she said. "I was a history honours student and grew up in a family where academics and curiosity were very much a part of our lives. Musafiri felt like a natural extension of that part of me. It is my attempt to travel through a city I thought I knew, but with fresh eyes."

A second act for Pushing Buttons

Musafiri comes from Pushing Buttons Studios, the production company Chadha and Fazal set up together, and it's only the banner's second project after the fiction feature Girls Will Be Girls. So this isn't just a new show, it's the studio's first real step outside scripted work.

For a couple whose public profile has largely run through acting credits, the move into a weekly non-fiction format on their own channel is a bet on a different kind of audience relationship, one built on eight straight Fridays rather than a single release date.

The first episode arrives September 25. Whether Musafiri finds an audience used to slicker travel content, or whether Chadha's take on the city carves out its own space, is the thing to watch once the weekly drops actually start.