George TsagkarakisA severed pig’s head talks to Shah Latif. It dispenses life advice. He almost never takes it.
That’s the sort of thing you sign up for with Bait, the six-episode Prime Video comedy created by and starring Riz Ahmed. It’s Amazon’s first James Bond-adjacent production, and it is nothing like what most fans were bracing for.
Shah is a struggling British-Pakistani actor whose life starts coming apart after he auditions for 007. No tuxedos, no Aston Martins, no glamour. Just a man trying and failing to become the version of himself he thinks the world requires before it’ll take him seriously.
The Fleabag comparison earns itself
There’s a sadness under Shah that’ll feel familiar if you’ve spent time with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedy. Both shows refuse to let the polished exterior stand. Both go after the mess underneath.
But Bait isn’t Fleabag with a man in the lead, and it isn’t a Bond parody with a thoughtful streak grafted on. It pulls from both to reach emotions people usually bury under the identities they build for public consumption.
Parody would have been the easy play. Ahmed didn’t take it.
What the 007 audition is actually about
People keep calling this a James Bond series. Fair enough, in a way. It’s also far deeper than it looks and a long way from any conventional spy thriller.
What it wants you to sit with is the pressure of being considered for 007, and specifically what that pressure does to a person of color chasing a role that’s been tied to whiteness since it started. Shah’s fixation on the part runs straight into his larger problem with identity.
He’s constantly calculating which version of himself the industry will accept. Then which version his family will accept. Then society. The audition process strips him down, and there’s a rawness to him that’s genuinely endearing. He wants everyone convinced he can carry a character that beloved. He’s also deeply insecure and desperate to prove it.
Dark, but never self-serious
The show goes to grim places. It stays self-aware the whole way through, and the darkness usually lands balanced against comedy that’ll make you laugh out loud, whether that’s Shah with his family or the aforementioned pig offering counsel he ignores.
The tone is distinctive enough that Bait can slide between genres without losing its footing, and it stays funny while it does. The thing gets under your skin. Shah’s anxieties read as intensely personal and completely universal at once, because respect and acceptability are what most of the people watching want too.
A crowded year on Prime Video, and Bait still wins
2026 gave the streamer a loaded slate of returning shows. Invincible season 4 arrived. So did the fourth installment of The Legend of Vox Machina and the final season of The Boys. The new arrivals piled up too: Scarpetta, Young Sherlock, Off Campus, Elle and the short-lived Spider Noir.
The returning titles don’t reinvent much. Most run on plots you’ve seen dozens of times, which is why Bait clears them. Elle is the sharpest example, arriving with the entire Legally Blonde franchise behind it and still not managing what Ahmed’s show does.
The year isn’t over. There’s still a solid argument that Bait is the best new Prime Video series of 2026.
The official logline calls it an existential crisis and a surreal conspiracy, triggered by an impending role. Both descriptions are accurate. Neither prepares you for the pig.
