Prime Video's 'Bait' Is a Heartbreaking and Hilarious James Bond Send-Up
Who will become the next James Bond actor? It's a question 007 fans have been asking since 2021, when Daniel Craig's final Bond film, No Time to Die, hit theaters and seemed to mark the end of one era of the franchise. Since then, the rumor mill about specific actors becoming Bond has become its own media event, perhaps even more dramatic than a Bond movie itself. And, partially in response to that ongoing question, is the new Prime Video show, Bait, which depicts an actor named Shah Latif (Riz Ahmed) who is literally auditioning for the role of James Bond in the first scene.
But is this show really about Bond? Yes and no. Bait is loaded with Bond Easter eggs, if you're paying close attention, but it's also mostly about a regular guy trying to navigate the idea of being almost, not quite, famous.
Bait begins as Shah is in the middle of an audition to play Bond and totally forgets his line. This isn't exactly our world; he's not reading lines with Denis Villeneuve, nor are the exact corporate powers-that-be controlling Bond mentioned. But, for the purposes of the show, it's best that this is a little bit of a fantasy. Ahmed is Latif; big names like Hamish Patel can play fictional people, too. (That said, the voice of Sir Patrick Stewart in Episode 2 is meant to be the actual Patrick Stewart, albeit in an entirely different guise than you'd ever expect.)
After Shah seemingly blows his audition, he decides to create a bit of publicity for himself by walking out of the front door, where he can be photographed, and thus, create some news that he is possibly the next James Bond. The show takes off from there, showing us that Shah isn't just a hapless, innocent actor caught up in some internet gossip hype machine. He's an active participant, and his desire for fame and to become the next James Bond doesn't make him into a hero, exactly.
What Ahmed does well here is to play Shah sympathetically as much as possible, but only to a point. Obviously, the average viewer can't imagine what it's like to be James Bond, but being a working-class person pursuing the goal of maybe getting a job to pretend to be James Bond, that's more relatable. And because Bait ultimately is a show about Shah's family and friends, the series essentially pits the fantasies of fame and fortune against the realities of the people who love, who also, sometimes, drive you crazy.
In some sense, Bait is about choosing between an idealized version of yourself, a dream avatar of a man, and just being yourself. Whether or not Shah can figure out which thing he actually wants is only part of the story. The series smartly escalates the action little by little, putting Shah into situations where some of us would never make the decisions he makes, while others might totally understand why he did what he did.
The bad calls, backstabbing, and hilarious amounts of insecurity coming from Shah are brilliantly over-the-top and down-to-earth simultaneously. Bait is a realistic show about an unrealistic series of events, and in that way, you could say, it's a twisted Hollywood tale of self-discovery that sometimes feels like an average guy's take on a James Bond adventure.