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Don’t miss Riz Ahmed taking on the “brown Bond” debate. Plus, the return of a Marvel superhero, Peaky Blinders’ next chapter and more Interview with the Vampire.
Bait ★★★★ (Amazon Prime Video)
When we first meet Shah Latif (Riz Ahmed), he’s performing. The British actor is giving suave menace as he auditions for the golden chalice of franchise roles: James Bond. The tuxedo fits, but when Shah messes up, his 007 moment is gone. That just means Shah, who is growing desperate, can deliver another performance: successful actor. As he’s leaving the audition, a paparazzo snaps away and by the time he gets home his image is online and mistaken speculation of a “Brown Bond” is trending. Mission accomplished.
That canniness and cringe, self-promotion and self-denial, is fundamental to Bait: a whiplash mix of satire and psychodrama created by Ahmed. Laced together in six concise half-hours, the show is about someone who’s been performing for so long that he’s lost track of his true self. Shah says all the right things, even when they’re contradictory. He’s reassuring his best friend and cousin, Zulfi (Guz Khan), that he hasn’t sold out, while pitching himself as an “ambassador” to a prestigious museum’s director mid-gala.
Bait is busy. You get a terrific sense of different London suburbs, particularly the Latif clan’s home of Wembley, and there’s a lively chatter throughout that feels lived-in. “I haven’t had any Google alerts for a while,” notes Shah’s loving mother, Tahira (Sheeba Chaddha). But once the headlines start, the attention goes crazy – there’s a hate crime at the family home and Shah’s ex, Yasmin (Ritu Arya), is quick off the mark with a condemnatory piece in the newspaper.
When he should be preparing for his second Bond audition, Shah starts unravelling. An inanimate object, voiced by Patrick Stewart, is urging him to grab success by any means possible, but it’s a one step forward, two steps back process. Ahmed, whose standout movie performances span Nightcrawler, Rogue One and Sound of Metal, not to mention a note-perfect Girls guest slot, skilfully articulates the many strands at play, whether it’s Shah’s fraught personal relationships or the way he’s edging ever closer to hypocrisy.
As cultural commentary, Bait has an obvious specificity. Shah, like Ahmed, is the son of Pakistani immigrants, and racism lurks as a violent memory and an institutional risk. But the story it’s telling can apply to anyone who’s part of a minority, anyone who feels they have to play different versions of themselves depending on the setting.
The willingness to experiment is exhilarating – great actors, such as Rafe Spall, have canny guest roles, while the tone can shift from paranoid thriller to Bollywood exuberance. This show definitely has a licence to thrill.
Colour Theories with Julio Torres ★★★½ (HBO Max)
A Salvadoran surrealist – the nation, not Dali – Julio Torres has twigged to a key tenet of being a cult artist: sustained productivity. Having graduated from writing on Saturday Night Live, where he penned the legendary Papyrus sketch for Ryan Gosling, Torres has co-created the sweetly fantastical comedy series Los Espookys (HBO Max) and then starred opposite Tilda Swinton in the menacing absurdism of his debut feature film, Problemista (Paramount+). Now his Broadway show has been released as a winning live special.
Is it stand-up? No, and not just because Torres is seated in a converted desk chair for the 70-minute performance. On a set that resembles a book, he talks through his beliefs about colours and what they represent. It’s whimsical in tone, but convincingly delivered even in the many witty asides. “Flying a kite is yellow,” Torres notes early on, before illustrating how a capital E “is an embrace from a father”. The tender and telling subtly take shape.
As a deadpan academic, Torres’ theories can sound akin to a Talking Heads lyric. “Navy blue is the colour of airports,” he declares, setting off a deep suspicion of the tone (it’s blue, but with unwelcome authoritarian tendencies). It’s an amusing, insightful performance, even when he’s falling out with his animatronic assistant, and there’s nothing inherently difficult in Torres’ performance style. This non-conformist is welcoming.
Daredevil: Born Again ★★★ (Disney+)
Marvel went back to the future for the first season of this superhero revival, successfully relaunching the 2010s character Daredevil (Charlie Cox), aka blind Hell’s Kitchen lawyer Matt Murdock. The second season goes one better, recalling superhero turned private eye Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter). The character, played with deep emotional fortitude by Ritter, has long broken the Marvel stereotypes. No cape, no false hope. The first season of Jessica Jones, from 2015, remains essential viewing, more influenced by feminism and film noir than comic books. She’s a welcome new lens for Daredevil.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man ★★½ (Netflix)
This feature-length continuation of the historical crime drama looks marvellous, from the bracing compositions to the icy blue eyes of Cillian Murphy, whose self-exiled crime lord, Tommy Shelby, returns to his home town of Birmingham as World War II takes hold. But the storytelling from creator Steven Knight is inconsistent, and it adds little to where the show finished in 2022 after six bloody seasons. More than anything, this plays like a bridge to the forthcoming sequel series, which will be centred on Tommy’s son, Duke (Barry Keoghan).
The Borderline ★★½ (Stan*)
Arrow and Heels star Stephen Amell anchors this Canadian crime drama, revolving around which lines can be safely crossed and which can’t. The obvious demarcation is the Canadian border with the United States, which is rife with criminal enterprises policed by Amell’s small-town Ontario officer, Henry Roland.
There’s also Henry’s bond with his best friend, Tommy Hawley (Hamza Haq), who has a risky connection with an international drug-smuggling syndicate. The sense of personal risk and obligation is genuine, but the larger crime dynamics are quite generic.
Interview with the Vampire ★★★★ (Netflix)
This sharp, sensuous adaptation of Anne Rice’s 1976 vampire horror novel of the same name has been prominent on my list of outstanding shows you probably haven’t seen for the past four years. Now, Netflix has licensed the first season, spotlighting this fascinating mix of queer period drama and supernatural intrigue. The series is centred on a relationship, in 1910s New Orleans, between Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), the swaggering, licentious French vampire who turns him. Both leads are excellent, and the show thankfully expands the source material.
*Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.
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