{"id":495894,"date":"2026-03-26T06:04:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T06:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/495894\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T06:04:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T06:04:13","slug":"bait-review-riz-ahmeds-comedy-is-petty-narcissistic-and-excellent-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/495894\/","title":{"rendered":"Bait review \u2013 Riz Ahmed\u2019s comedy is petty, narcissistic \u2026 and excellent | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

If I were Riz Ahmed<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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 \u2013 a career-stage roughly analogous to Ahmed\u2019s circa 2016. These pressures bring about a crisis in Shah\u2019s life: he\u2019s afraid of becoming \u201cbait\u201d, both in the London slang sense of \u201cobvious\u201d, \u201cnaff\u201d, a \u201csell-out\u201d, and also in the closer-to-OED sense of a lure, used \u2013 in this case \u2013 by the British state to co-opt legitimate dissent.<\/p>\n

So this is a show that\u2019s part semi-autobiographical sitcom, in the vein of Curb Your Enthusiasm or Ramy (one of Ahmed\u2019s co-writers, Azam Mahmood, is an alum), and part surrealist industry satire. It\u2019s pleasingly reminiscent of Naqqash Khalid\u2019s under-seen 2023 film In Camera, or indeed Mogul Mowgli, Ahmed\u2019s own fantastic 2020 collaboration with director Bassam Tariq, who also directs three of these episodes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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\u2019s mum, Tahira, deserves special props; an actor of such palpable quality that she elevates every scene she\u2019s in. The nuances of their mother-son relationship and how it feeds Tahira\u2019s own insecurities could have sustained several more episodes.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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 (Multicultural London English)and RP (for the museum galas), via a stream of merciless insults \u2013 mostly coming from cousin Zulfi (Guz Khan), and mostly directed at Shah.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also a show of community strength \u2013 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The elegant and fierce Ritu Arya (from Polite Society<\/a>) is also great casting as love interest Yasmin. She joins Shah for a Brick Lane rickshaw chase scene, rooted in the millennial Londoner\u2019s understanding that there is no more romantic song in the universe than UK garage anthem Flowers. Later, there\u2019s also a less culturally layered, but equally smart, subversion of that romcom staple, the airport dash scene.<\/p>\n

Elegant and fierce \u2026 Riz Ahmed with Ritu Arya in Bait. Photograph: Amazon MGM Studios<\/p>\n

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\u2019s when he\u2019s soliloquising with a pig\u2019s head \u2013 in place of Hamlet\u2019s more traditional skull \u2013 that the patience is strained.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 (\u201cI\u2019ve never seen anybody turn a performance round like that!\u201d) feels not only pointlessly self-congratulatory but also, well \u2026 a bit bait.<\/p>\n

Then again, if Bait is the story of an Ahmed-like actor getting over himself \u2013 in which Riz Ahmed fails, conspicuously, to get over himself \u2013 that also makes sense. And it sets us up nicely for a second series. Only this time, hopefully, with 20% more Guz Khan.<\/p>\n

Bait is on Prime Video now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If I were Riz Ahmed, I would be very up myself too. In the two decades since his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":495895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-495894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/495895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}