Shah Latif gets life advice from a severed pig’s head. He almost never follows it.
Welcome to Bait, the six-episode Prime Video comedy that Riz Ahmed created and stars in. Amazon’s first James Bond-adjacent production bears almost no resemblance to whatever fans were preparing themselves for.
The premise: Shah, a struggling British-Pakistani actor, watches his life unravel after auditioning for 007. There are no tuxedos here, no Aston Martins, no glamour whatsoever. Only a man failing to become whoever he believes the world demands he be before it will take him seriously.
The Fleabag comparison earns itself
Anyone who has spent time with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedy will recognise the sadness sitting beneath Shah. Neither show lets a polished surface go unchallenged. Both dig for the mess underneath it.
Yet Bait is neither Fleabag recast with a male lead nor a Bond send-up with some thoughtfulness bolted on afterwards. It borrows from both to get at feelings that people typically bury beneath the identities they construct for public view.
The easy route was parody. Ahmed went elsewhere.
What the 007 audition is actually about
The label “James Bond series” keeps getting attached to this. That’s not unreasonable. It is also considerably deeper than it appears, and nowhere near a conventional spy thriller.
The subject it really asks you to sit with is the weight of being in contention for 007 — and more precisely, what that weight does to a person of color pursuing a role bound up with whiteness since its inception. Shah’s obsession with landing the part collides head-on with his broader struggle over identity.
He never stops working out which version of himself the industry will take. Then which one his family will take. Then society. Stripped bare by the audition process, he carries a rawness that is genuinely endearing. He needs everyone persuaded that he can shoulder a character that beloved — and he is profoundly insecure, desperate to prove exactly that.
Dark, but never self-serious
Grim territory gets covered. Self-awareness never slips, though, and the darkness generally arrives counterweighted by comedy that will pull a laugh out of you — Shah with his relatives, or that pig dispensing guidance he disregards.
So particular is the tone that Bait shifts between genres without stumbling, staying funny throughout. It burrows under your skin. Shah’s anxieties register as both fiercely personal and entirely universal, since respect and acceptability are what most viewers are after as well.
A crowded year on Prime Video, and Bait still wins
The streamer had a loaded slate of returning shows in 2026. Season 4 of Invincible landed, alongside the fourth run of The Legend of Vox Machina and the closing season of The Boys. New titles stacked up as well: Scarpetta, Young Sherlock, Off Campus, Elle and the short-lived Spider Noir.
Reinvention isn’t really on the agenda for the returning titles. Most coast on plots you’ve encountered dozens of times, and that’s precisely why Bait clears them. The sharpest illustration is Elle, which showed up carrying the whole Legally Blonde franchise and still fell short of what Ahmed’s show pulls off.
With the year still unfinished, there remains a solid case that Bait is the best new Prime Video series of 2026.
An existential crisis and a surreal conspiracy set off by an impending role — that’s the official logline. Both halves are accurate. Neither one prepares you for the pig.