I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Bait, the new Amazon Prime six-part series written and produced by Riz Ahmed. I was watching, thinking clearly there’s a great deal of fuss about it, so it’s either really useful and interesting and artistically well put, or people are praising it because of the Riz Ahmed effect, which I believe has significant purchase among particular demographics. This may sound like professional envy, or some need to be critical for the sake of it in order not to be seen as part of a body of people who have viewed this drama series rather positively. The forever unamused critic—it’s never a fun position to take, and yet we do it all the time.
Twenty years ago, Ahmed was involved in projects including The Four Lions and The Road to Guantanamo and various TV series that explored British Muslims afflicted by issues related to extremism and terror, whether through dark comedy or through dramas driven by motivations in relation to being and belonging. These are existential crises that first-generation minorities have traded in literature, television, and film over the years. Sometimes the view is comedic; at other times these dive into introspective psychological crises.
Bait attempts to do exactly that but also functions as a vehicle for the actor-producer. Some would say there is a cynical ploy to present a semi-autobiographical case study of the issues that have afflicted him personally and professionally and in relation to the roles he has been offered. There’s no doubt that this is autobiographical, with real-world reflections on his time growing up in Wembley, represented in this drama too.
There’s also the question of what it is to be an actor who must give something up in relation to performance in order to be accepted. How does an actor hold true to his form as an artist and a talent in his own making, such that a film or television drama can wrap around the individual rather than the other way around? It’s clear that this is something he has been trying to deal with professionally and perhaps existentially himself, and what this drama does is try to piece it all together in a way that is comical, deep, psychological, at times alarming, and at times arresting.
This is the background to the series, but what is it about? What did I think of it? It’s about an actor facing an existential crisis in relation to being an actor for a role that for some would be seen as something beyond him, simply because of who he is: a short Asian man potentially up for the role of James Bond, one of those archetypal male, dark, tall, relatively brutish roles played over the years since Sean Connery took it up in the 1960s and by a series of white men who have made it their own. There was a short moment in the recent offerings from Daniel Craig where James Bond temporarily became a Black woman, but that was short-lived and reversed quite poignantly in the very last utterance of that particular series. The actual casting of the next James Bond is something that’s going on in real time, while a director and studio have been announced; a male or female lead has yet to emerge. The betting is that it will be a white male, although it’s unclear at this stage.
What Ahmed’s character does is take this crisis of appointment into a crisis of identity that has real-world existential implications for his state of mind and his sense of well-being but also his relationships with closest family members and those at the periphery of his professional life. This all feels rather rudimentary and unequivocal, but what we have is a drama that surpassed my own high-standard barriers for entertainment. For someone at my age, I’m rarely amused and unlikely to enjoy very much unless it falls into a very specific category of favourite themes, actors, or genres.
What I thought worked well with this drama series was its immensely high production value, with every single member of the cast playing their roles out of the park, maintaining the humour, the gravity, and the timing to perfection. It was never dull or limited by way of development or depth. It was sharp, critically engaging, and often extremely funny, while never losing the intensity of the more affecting directions the storyline was taking.
At some point, it becomes a deep psychological profile of a man who talks to a pig’s head with the voice of Patrick Stewart, somebody whose private security turns out to be an MI6 recruiter, somebody whose agent has tried to get him a role and is potentially holding a gun to his head to achieve success (for him and for her), somebody whose relationships with his friends and family are fraught with tension and ambiguity around the need to be seen and recognised while maintaining a sense of loyalty and duty to the clan, the family, or indeed the faith.
What holds this together is the comedy and the acting by actors such as Guz Khan, who times his lines with perfection and who is naturally a funny individual. The rest of the cast are outstanding, and the pace flips between having to stare into Riz Ahmed’s face as he goes through a shedload of emotions while the camera follows him around and through the streets of London and at train stations, airports, and in Tubes and ultimately around the streets of Brick Lane, in and out of restaurants and clubs, with a wonderfully fantastic set of conversations and engagements in episode three between Riz Ahmed’s character and an ex-girlfriend, which is beautifully shot, with excellent tension between both actors played out with soul, slapstick and seriousness.
At the end, I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would, and I’m pleased to say that because often I’m left disappointed and never really make it to the end of some of these things. Anything I have to watch has to grip me visually, intellectually, and emotionally, but also through sound and scene-setting, capturing my attention while stimulating my already overloaded and overstimulated mind; maintaining the pace; and taking me across the journey into a finite endpoint that delivers its message clearly and resoundingly, leaving me satisfied that I’ve had my time invested in genuine art. Each of the episodes is no more than about 25 minutes of real time, and the six episodes can be watched in one night. It took me three nights, in fact, and in the end, I was very much looking forward to the very last two episodes, which culminated the entire series in a fitting and effective way.
4/5 Stars.
A footnote on the title itself. Bait takes its title from a multilingual pun that operates on several interconnected levels:
British slang: “Bait” means being blatant, attention-seeking, or trolling online – referencing how the protagonist becomes a spectacle when rumours spread that he might be the next James Bond.
Arabic/Hebrew: The word means “home” (بيت), touching on themes of belonging and identity that Shah (the protagonist played by Ahmed) grapples with as he chases mainstream acceptance.
Urdu: It signals loyalty or allegiance, raising questions about whether Shah is betraying his community by pursuing a role that symbolizes British establishment power.
Spy thriller context: Bait is what lures someone into a trap – mirroring how Shah is “trapped” by the industry, media frenzy, and his own ambition.
Industry critique: The title also references “diversity bait”—casting minority actors for optics without genuine inclusion.
Ahmed himself called it a “layer cake” of meanings, noting they “accidentally stumbled on the perfect title” that captures all these flavours simultaneously. The ambiguity reflects the show’s central question: is Shah being baited by the system, or is he the bait himself?