Riz Ahmed's Bait Almost Convinced Me He Could Be James Bond (And That’s Not Even the Point)

This dramedy used 007 as a hook and delivered something way more interesting

Okay so I went into Bait fully expecting a six-episode Bond fan-service fest with Riz Ahmed looking gorgeous in a tuxedo and me spending the whole time thinking “yeah, he could absolutely be 007.”

And sure, that happens.

But what got me was how quickly the show pulls the rug out from under you. It uses Bond the same way a really good trap uses bait, which, yes, the title is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿🍿🍿/5

What You Need to Know

Bait follows Sha Latif, a struggling actor drowning in debt and ego in roughly equal measure, who bungles an audition for James Bond, gets papped leaving the building, and suddenly the entire internet has decided he’s the next 007.

The series covers four genuinely chaotic days as his family, his ex, his PR delusions, and his own spectacular self-sabotage all collide at once.

It’s funnier than it has any right to be. It’s also more emotionally gutting than I was prepared for, and I say that as someone who regularly watches true crime documentaries about people who dissolve bodies in bathtubs, so my emotional threshold is not low.

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What’s the Vibe Here?

The best comparison I can make is if you took the anxiety spiral of Uncut Gems, wrapped it in a British comedy, and then someone’s South Asian family showed up uninvited and made everything simultaneously worse and more hilarious.

The pacing is genuinely frantic.

The camera work pulls you right into Sha’s headspace, and his headspace is not a relaxing place to be.

I actually had to pause at one point because my chest felt tight, which is wild for a comedy series. Marc would call that a character flaw on my part. He’d be right.

The show has this really specific rhythm where it keeps luring you in with laughs and then punching you in the throat with something real.

Sha is not a good person for most of the runtime. He’s opportunistic, delusional, and kind of a disaster. He fakes wealth, works every PR angle he can find, and convinces himself he deserves something he hasn’t earned.

Watching him deteriorate across six episodes is compelling in the way that slowing down at a motorway crash is compelling, except smarter and with better outfits.

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What Worked in Riz Ahmed's Bait

Riz Ahmed carries this show on his back and makes it look effortless. The meta quality of him playing a British Muslim actor rumored for Bond, when he’s actually been rumored for Bond in real life, gives everything an authenticity no studio algorithm could fake.

Ritu Arya ( of Umbrella Academy fame ) shows up as the ex-lover and steals every scene she’s in. Her chemistry with Ahmed in episode four made me unreasonably jealous of a fictional character. Guz Khan ( of Army of Thieves fame ) as the cousin brings real laughs without ever feeling like comic relief.

The racial politics thread is also handled with genuine nuance. Sha faces pushback from within his own community, not just from predictable online racists, and the show doesn’t simplify it. That complexity hits harder than anything else here.

What Didn’t

The last two episodes fall apart. An MI5 conspiracy subplot appears from nowhere and refuses to leave.

Dream sequences pile up fast. The Bond audition, the entire premise, basically disappears after episode two and reappears at the end, as if it forgot something on the stove.

Six episodes at 25 minutes each sounds focused. The writers still tried to cram in four seasons of ideas. Some land. Some really don’t.

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My Final Verdict

Riz Ahmed's Bait is messy, ambitious, occasionally chaotic, and genuinely unlike anything else on streaming right now. Riz Ahmed created something with a real point of view and a specific voice, even when that voice starts screaming incoherently by episode five.

Watch it for Ahmed, stay for the family chaos, forgive it for the ending.

Have you watched Bait yet, and did the pig head make you feel things you weren’t expecting to feel? Tell me in the comments.