Riz Ahmed will hook you with his new series, ‘Bait’

The festival premiered the first three episodes of the show—all six episodes are due to be released on March 25 on Amazon Prime Video. The opening scene drops us mid-action, with Shah cosplaying as James Bond in a slick high-budget production. He sells it the way someone does when they know they are in on the joke: his 007 is hyperaware of being set in a TV show. Shah is doing well enough until he freezes up on a line, and the illusion is ruined. We see behind the scenes of the audition process, a white woman yelling at Shah for messing it up, and Shah facing a mirror and berating himself in the changing room for losing an opportunity of a lifetime. Shah is a very anxious man, but a resourceful one. When he is asked to leave from the back entrance to avoid any paparazzi snapping a picture, he finds a way to leave from the front entrance and gets himself papped. He is on his way to another audition when the media stirs up a frenzy. Some people are happy. Others are very much not.

The first three episodes build a rich world of Shah’s life. His family includes his parents—played remarkably by Indian film actress Sheeba Chaddha and Pakistani actor Sajid Hassan—and cousins, in joyful turns by Guz Khan and Aasiya Shah, who live with his parents after the passing of their mom. Shah’s mother is thrilled that he might be James Bond; his dad jokes about subbing in for the sex scenes; and his cousin, helming a successful taxi and rideshare business, is a bit confused as Shah is not that tall and also, not white. In episode two, a rival South Asian actor, in a fantastic cameo by Himesh Patel, is seen ferociously circling the role—a nod to the idea that there aren’t enough seats for all of us—at a benefit held at a museum. The third episode centers on Eid and here is where the show really is at its best thus far. Community members do not shy away from taunting Shah about the Bond role and Shah is hilariously roped into making an apology statement to avoid being sued for his actions in episode two. The topic of mental health is broached by Shah’s mother’s nemesis (played by Sonia Razdan) and the episode ends in a dramatic turn that left audience members gasping.

From left, Sajid Hassan, Riz Ahmed, and Sheeba Chaddha in "Bait."

Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

The chemistry of the show feels lived in and solid, just like when you visit a close cousin’s house. The banter is fantastic, both in English and Urdu. Bollywood instrumentals are used to denote a change in stakes. Brown people are nothing if not funny, biting, and petty towards loved ones. The show operates well as a satire on the entertainment industry but more so a cultural one. Another very sparse cameo by Ritu Arya has her character be a stand-in for the camp of people who think the role of James Bond isn’t a worthy pursuit—her character pens an op-ed about not needing a South Asian Bond as it perpetuates the harmful aspiration to whiteness. The timeliness of the show is also opportune as speculations about the next Bond are plentiful. Ahmed as a creator makes sure to hit every critique he himself may have faced if and when he was ever in talks to be Bond.

The slight yet present “but” to precede is that sometimes the show just feels a bit convoluted. Ahmed seems determined to land every possible joke and idea about a Brown man gearing up to be Bond, sometimes to the show’s detriment. For example, there is a scene early on in which Shah gets stopped by a white fan who claims that his girlfriend loves him. He then misidentifies Shah as Dev Patel in a selfie. Upon watching the show, the audience learns that Ahmed is a very funny actor and it is apparent, again, that he is very talented. He is perhaps cursed with the affliction all high-achieving Brown kids and children of immigrants face that we need to bring a 120 percent to everything we do when just 90 percent should have sufficed—in this way, the show lives up to its British slang homage.

Riz Ahmed plays Shah Latif, a struggling British Pakistani actor, in "Bait."

Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

In the same Sundance conversation, Ahmed shared that Bait is about the “crazy contradictions between public and private life,” and that “life sometimes feels like one long audition.” With Shah perpetually on the cusp of a nervous breakdown, the show mirrors the pressure-cooker stakes of James Bond itself. Real life is messy, narratively incoherent, and deeply pressurizing. In that sense, the real question isn’t whether Shah can play Bond, but whether he can stop performing long enough to survive. Fame, representation, validation, the show dangles them all. The trick is realizing what is being baited, and at what cost. Ahmed also promised that the new episodes will get even crazier. Consider me tentatively hooked—the audition isn’t over yet.