When TV Stalled, Surbhi Turned the Pause Into Garam Masala Dating

A television project based on her life never reached the screen. What this Delhi based comedian made next did not need anyone’s permission.

By early 2020 Surbhi had a television pilot, a production company behind it and a one-woman show ready to travel. Then the industry shut down. Six years later she has a live show in its fourth season and a waiting list of people who want to be on it.

The pilot was a scripted comedy about an Indian teenager who arrives at an American college alone, which is what Surbhi had done at 17. She developed it with Korchula Productions, the company run by the filmmakers Ted and Courtney Balaker, and it had reached discussions with WarnerMedia.

The stage piece, Indian Girl You Just Met, drew on the same material. She performed an early version at a private event during the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020 and had booked a run at the Edinburgh Fringe for that August.

Monika Mikkelsen, a former Paramount casting executive, advised her on the show. The hour was built around landing in America at 17 without knowing how to order a sandwich, and by the Sundance performance Surbhi could hold a room with it from start to finish. The material was ready for a run.

The pandemic interrupted those plans.
Production offices closed in March. The Fringe was cancelled in April, for the first time in its history.
Courtney Balaker remembers a script the company loved and a calendar full of meetings, all of which disappeared in the same week.

Surbhi does not dress the period up. In the account she gives now, the disappointment was that work already under way did not become the career she had imagined. “I was not able to live my dreams,” she says. She was 22, her project was on hold and the clubs where she might have worked out her frustration were closed.

Garam Masala Dating came later, in collaboration with comedian Wyatt Feegrado. It gave her somewhere to put both her writing instincts and her ability to work a room. Instead of presenting characters from a script, the two hosts would be talking to people whose first meeting became the evening’s entertainment. Garam Masala Dating puts South Asian singles on stage, with Surbhi and Feegrado hosting their first date in front of an audience. The show’s team reports more than 40 sold-out productions across four seasons. Its clips have also carried the format beyond the people able to attend in person.
The difference from her earlier work is practical. A scripted pilot has characters whose next lines belong to the writer. In the dating show, the hosts know the setup but have to work with the answers they receive. The conversation can take a direction neither of them expected, and managing that change is part of the performance.

Surbhi’s role extends beyond being the face of the show. As co-creator and executive producer, she has helped build the framework in which those encounters happen. The recurring format gives the audience something recognisable, while a different pair of participants brings different material.

“With the pilot I waited two years for people to say yes,” she says. “With this show, the only people who have to say yes are the ones buying tickets, and they tell you the same night.”

The format changed as it grew. Early editions were loose, with the hosts improvising around whatever the daters gave them. Surbhi began to apply what she had learned in script development. Each date now has a shape, with an opening, a complication in the middle and a decision at the end, even though nobody on stage has been given a line.

She says the writing years were not wasted on the live show. A scripted pilot taught her where a scene turns. Hosting taught her to find that turn in real time, with a stranger, while 300 people wait.

The Balakers stayed close throughout. They had first met Surbhi when she was a college student, and they kept reading her drafts and coming to her shows long after the pilot was shelved. Ted Balaker saw the dating show in its third season and sat at the back while a room of strangers shouted at a man who had admitted that his mother still did his laundry. He told Surbhi afterwards that it was the best thing she had made.

The unmade television project has not vanished from that history. Nor does Garam Masala Dating require it to become a fortunate accident. One ambition was interrupted; another body of work followed. Today, when Surbhi steps on stage to host a date, that work has an audience sitting in front of her.