Bait Review

Riz Ahmed creates it, writes it and stars in it, and the premise is the trap: a British Pakistani actor gets four days to prove he can be James Bond while the entire country argues about whether he should be allowed to try. Critics put it among the best reviewed new series of the year, and the reason is that Ahmed refuses the easy version. This is not really a show about racism in casting.

It is about what wanting the part does to a man, and the comedy keeps sliding into something closer to a breakdown filmed in real time. Ahmed is extraordinary in it, playing Shah as charming, calculating and increasingly unwell without ever signaling which is which, while Guz Khan, Ritu Arya and Sheeba Chaddha give the family scenes the weight the satire needs to push against. Six half hours is the right length, and the finale gathers the eccentricity into a point rather than shrugging at it.

The dissent is small but worth reporting. A minority of reviewers found it more admirable than achieved, a series whose best ideas sit at the edges of scenes rather than inside them, and the swerves into genre pastiche lose the thread for stretches. Audiences have run a little cooler than the press, though not by much. It is shot cleanly and unshowily, the one ordinary thing about it. Everything else is a writer and performer taking a swing at his own ambition and connecting.