‘Bait’ Review: Riz Ahmed Leads Amazon’s Showbiz Satire About Fame, Identity and the Bond Fantasy

The premise, the setup, and even the first episode of Bait suggest something close to a standout series—one with real insight into showbiz culture and its uneasy overlap with the real world, filtered through the experiences of a working actor. Unfortunately, across the next five episodes, the show steadily loses momentum, originality, and bite. It never fully collapses—those initial thematic threads remain in place, and it stays watchable—but it never quite recaptures the impact, sharpness, or humor of its terrific opening.

Created by and starring Riz Ahmed, the series casts him as Shah Latif, a British actor of Pakistani descent whose career hasn’t exactly taken off. At the start, however, that might be about to change: Shah is auditioning to become the next James Bond. Dressed the part, projecting the cool confidence and seductive edge of 007, he seems like a natural fit—until he blanks on a crucial line. It’s not a total disaster, but it leaves things hanging, pending a possible callback.

The real conflict kicks in when Shah, instead of slipping out the back as instructed, walks out the front and ends up being photographed by a paparazzo. The predictable follows: the image circulates online and in the press, positioning him as a potential new Bond. Even if the chances are slim, Shah starts living inside that fantasy. The problem is that in the age of social media and instant opinion, his hypothetical casting quickly becomes controversial—particularly among racist voices unwilling to accept a non-white 007. It’s a hostility Shah has dealt with his entire life.

From there, the series follows Shah through a string of personal and professional complications tied to his ambition and to the friction it creates with his family, friends, and ex-girlfriend. At the core is a troubling realization: Shah seems to believe that being accepted means downplaying—or outright suppressing—his identity, trying to pass as something more “neutral,” more traditionally British. That tension fuels a narrative that shifts tones constantly, veering from comedy to drama, from industry satire (he’s often mistaken for Dev Patel) to something closer to an action series, with increasingly surreal touches.

More than anything, Bait becomes a portrait of a man at odds with himself—his background, his religion, his sense of belonging, and his large, vibrant Muslim family, which he both loves and feels constrained by. The show lays all of this out early on, but by the third episode it starts to spin its wheels, layering in genre experiments (from Bollywood pastiche to horror to action), increasingly exaggerated situations, and a bizarre subplot involving a pig’s head thrown at his house that Shah begins to imagine as a kind of advisor—voiced, no less, by Patrick Stewart.

To its credit, Bait never completely loses sight of what it’s trying to say. It works as a critique of the kinds of temptations—bait, in every sense—that can pull people off course, distancing them from their communities and sense of self. Shah begins as someone genuinely liked and respected by those around him, but his fixation on becoming Bond gradually erodes that goodwill. He comes to believe that success requires detachment, even rejection, of where he comes from.

Given that it’s an Amazon MGM Studios production—the same corporate entity that controls the Bond franchise—it’s no surprise that the series stops short of directly critiquing 007. In practice, the Bond angle functions more as a narrative «bait» than a sustained line of inquiry. At most, there’s an ironic contrast between the effortless confidence embodied by Bond and Shah’s far more anxious, insecure, and self-absorbed personality. Mapping that gap—and the occasional overlap—is central to his journey.

At six episodes running about 20–25 minutes each, Bait plays almost like a long feature. It’s often entertaining, frequently funny, and anchored by a strong performance from Ahmed, supported by a solid ensemble that includes Guz Khan as his cousin Zulfi and Ritu Arya as his ex. The show also benefits from a vivid, naturalistic sense of contemporary London. But sometime after a charming fourth episode, it begins to drift—losing that grounded feel, piling on increasingly contrived setbacks, and heading toward a somewhat predictable conclusion.

Still, for all its unevenness, it leaves an amusing lingering question: given everything on display here, Ahmed might actually make a compelling Bond. Or was that Dev Patel?