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If I was Riz Ahmed, I would be very up myself too. In the two decades since his screen career began, the actor has won Oscars and Baftas; been cast in a Star Wars film and a Charli xcx video; inspired a metric for Muslim on-screen representation (the Riz Test) and crafted a body of work comprising performances which are both individually excellent and collectively meaningful.
He has done so by combining talent with an unusual willingness to engage with the wider context of what it means to be a brown British person on 21st-century planet Earth. I imagine a certain amount of ego is also necessary to power the whole enterprise. And if so, what of it?
That’s one question explored by Bait, the new six-episode series created and co-written by Ahmed, who also stars. He plays Shah Latif, a rapper turned actor from a lively west London Pakistani Muslim family, who finds himself in contention to replace Daniel Craig as the new 007 – a career-stage roughly analogous to Ahmed’s circa 2016. These pressures bring about a crisis in Shah’s life: he’s afraid of becoming “bait”, both in the London slang sense of “obvious”, “naff”, a “sell-out”, and also in the closer-to-OED sense of a lure, used – in this case – by the British state to co-opt legitimate dissent.
So this is a show that’s part semi-autobiographical sitcom, in the vein of Curb Your Enthusiasm or Ramy (one of Ahmed’s co-writers, Azam Mahmood, is an alum), and part surrealist industry satire. It’s pleasingly reminiscent of Naqqash Khalid’s under-seen 2023 film In Camera, or indeed Mogul Mowgli, Ahmed’s own fantastic 2020 collaboration with director Bassam Tariq, who also directs three of these episodes.
That doubly self-referential stance might have worn thin, but Bait overcomes any viewer skepticism by rooting the silly fun of set-pieces such as the Bond fight send-up in an emotionally authentic family drama. Sheeba Chaddha as Shah’s mum, Tahira, deserves special props; an actor of such palpable quality that she elevates every scene she’s in. The nuances of their mother-son relationship and how it feeds Tahira’s own insecurities could have sustained several more episodes.
It’s not a sitcom then, but it is frequently very funny. Much of the humour comes from the dialogue: a dazzling display of second-gen immigrant linguistic dexterity, which slips between Urdu, Arabic, MLE and RP (for the museum galas), via a stream of merciless insults – mostly coming from cousin Zulfi (Guz Khan), and mostly directed at Shah.
But it’s also a show of community strength – by which I mean the British south Asian actor community, in which Ahmed is a revered leader. Besides Khan (of Man Like Mobeen fame), there are great cameos/roles for Himesh Patel, Nabhaan Rizwan and Sagar Radia (AKA Rishi from Industry), plus multiple name-checks for Oscar-nominated Dev Patel. It’s a way of acknowledging and transcending the professional rivalries that can result when British film still seemingly operates a one-in-one-out policy, like a racist doorman at a Shoreditch night club.
The elegant and fierce Ritu Arya (from Polite Society) is also great casting as love interest Yasmin. She joins Shah for a Brick Lane rickshaw chase scene, rooted in the millennial Londoner’s understanding that there is no more romantic song in the universe than UK garage anthem Flowers. Later, there’s also a less culturally layered, but equally smart, subversion of that romcom staple, the airport dash scene.
Generally, Bait is best when Ahmed-the-performer is bouncing off one or more of the excellent cast, and when Ahmed-the-writer is exposing his most petty, narcissistic and self-absorbed instincts. It’s when he’s soliloquising with a pig’s head – in place of Hamlet’s more traditional skull – that the patience is strained.
Nobody needs reminding that this guy can act, and could play Bond backwards with his eyes closed if he wanted to. The point, surely, is that he’s got better things to do. So to follow up all that courageous, self-lacerating writing with a scene in which Shah triumphantly wows a director (“I’ve never seen anybody turn a performance round like that!”) feels not only pointlessly self-congratulatory but also, well … a bit bait.
Then again, if Bait is the story of an Ahmed-like actor getting over himself – in which Riz Ahmed fails, conspicuously, to get over himself – that also makes sense. And it sets us up nicely for a second series. Only this time, hopefully, with 20% more Guz Khan.
