It Felt a Little Like Kismet: A Conversation with ‘Bait’ Co-Showrunner & Writer Ben Karlin

When Bait was first announced, I approached it with some caution. Riz Ahmed teaming up with Ben Karlin, a man whose comedic DNA was forged at The Onion and sharpened across years of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, sounded promising on paper but uncertain in practice. Then the teaser dropped, and every shred of that caution evaporated. I knew immediately I was the exact audience this show was built for.

Bait follows Shah Latif, a struggling British-Pakistani actor whose life detonates when a rumor surfaces that he is in contention to become the next James Bond. What unfolds across six episodes is far stranger and more personal than the premise suggests: an industry satire that mutates into a genuine reckoning with identity, self-sabotage, and the psychological toll of chasing a version of success never designed with you in mind. Riz Ahmed is electrifying in the lead, and Patrick Stewart voicing a hallucinated pig's head as Shah's inner critic might be the single most inspired creative swing in recent television comedy.

Behind it sits Ben Karlin, co-showrunner and writer, tasked with building the room and ultimately writing the finale that had to bring this fever dream home. I spoke with Ben about the years at The Onion that taught him everything, co-creating with an actor this exposed, and what it means to be a total outsider on the most personal project of someone else's life.

This interview has been edited for flow and clarity.

Rahul Menon: Before Bait, before The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, there was a young Ben Karlin at The Onion, learning how to make satirical comedy land with surgical precision in print. What did those years teach you about structure, timing, and finding the right angle that you still reach for today?

Ben Karlin: The Onion was basically comedy college for me, and the most important lesson I took away was about point of view. Everything starts with having a distinct, and ideally unique, point of view. And that applies to every format and every medium. Also, we didn't worry too much about the audience. We just kind of wanted to entertain ourselves and had the arrogance, confidence, or naivete to let that be enough.

RM: When you were first paired with Riz Ahmed on Bait, on paper it sounded like a genuinely unusual combination. What were those first conversations like, and what did you understand about what Riz was trying to make that made you feel this was the right project for you?

BK: Well, I spent about 15 years doing narrative comedy in TV and film after I left Late Night, so I have developed some other muscles when it comes to storytelling. I always look for interesting ideas and people to work with. Riz checked both those boxes. I admired him and his work from afar, and after one or two conversations I could tell that we both had a hunger to push things in a way that could be fun and rewarding. We really sparked to the idea of doing something that jumped genres.

RM: At its core, Bait is built around a gap that Riz has spoken about with remarkable honesty: the distance between your public self and your private self, and the shame that lives in that gap. As a showrunner, how do you create the conditions where that kind of raw, self-lacerating material can actually be funny rather than simply painful?

BK: That's literally the job. Riz came to the table with a million ideas, and we set about sifting through them and trying to connect as many as we could without making the whole endeavor feel unwieldy. As personal as the show is for Riz, so many other people touch the project, contribute material, shape it, that it becomes something else. No one was going to let the show not be funny, least of all me.

There is something genuinely instructive in how matter-of-fact Karlin is about the origins of this partnership. No mythologizing, no grand creative manifesto. Just two people who recognized a shared hunger and decided to chase it. That same unfussy honesty runs through this entire conversation, and it is part of why Bait feels as alive as it does.

RM: Bait assembles a genuinely remarkable writers' room, a group from genuinely diverse backgrounds and sensibilities. How did you shape that room, and how did you ensure those voices were genuinely shaping the show rather than supporting a vision that was already fixed?

BK: Riz and I were very aligned on the type of room we wanted: a range of voices, some familiarity with the world we were depicting, good blend of ages and backgrounds, and no dickheads. There wasn't really a fixed vision for the show. Riz was genuinely open to ideas, and that really is the only way these things work.

RM: The title Bait carries an extraordinary range of meanings: in British slang it means attention-seeking, in Arabic and Hebrew it means home, in Urdu it signals loyalty, and it references the spy thriller trap mechanism at the center of the plot. How did the room hold all of those registers together across six episodes?

BK: First of all, we didn't have the title until months and months after we finished production. What's cool about working on something over a longer time horizon is that it tends to morph before your very eyes, so by the time we came around to the title Bait, and realized it had all these other meanings that fit our show, it felt a little like kismet. But we didn't go into making it with that title as an organizing principle. We did go into making the show knowing we wanted to hopscotch between genres and tones as Riz's character spun out over the season.

RM: Patrick Stewart voicing a hallucinating pig's head as Shah's foul-mouthed inner critic is one of the most delightfully unhinged ideas in recent television. How did that concept develop, and how on earth did you land Patrick Stewart?

BK: The talking pig's head was a pure room idea. Dipika Guha, an incredibly talented writer, pitched a version of it early on and it just stuck. We knew that Shah's journey was very internal, and this can be difficult to dramatize, so finding a comedic vehicle was key. Once you make the list of recognizable white male voices from British acting royalty, Patrick Stewart is pretty much the first idea you come up with. We always knew he needed to be mean and then go on a real journey himself later in the season. The great thing about having it be VO is you can try a million things because you don't have to match the lips. And we tried more than a million.

The pig's head is the show's clearest distillation of a larger philosophy at work in this conversation: take the hardest, most internal material and find the strangest possible vehicle to dramatize it. Karlin and his room never flinch from difficulty. They just refuse to be boring about it.

RM: Getting Barbara Broccoli's blessing to use the James Bond brand in a comedy series is not a small thing. What was the pitch to her, and what convinced her this was a worthy and respectful use of one of the most protected intellectual properties in entertainment history?

BK: It helped beyond measure that Riz had a pre-existing relationship with Barbara. And it also helped that we had scripts to show her. She is smart enough to understand what we were trying to do. And, in its own small way, our show reinforces the cultural importance of Bond, so it is value added to the IP. Nevertheless, 9 out of 10 producers in her position say no to the request. Still can't believe she said yes.

RM: You wrote the finale episode yourself, Episode 6, "The Subtle One". What did you need the finale to do that you felt only you could execute, and how did that episode change in the writing from what you originally imagined?

BK: Me writing the finale was more a function of us not finishing all the episodes while the room was convened than making a grand statement only a writer of my caliber could make. I wish I could lie and say otherwise. We had such a detailed process in our writers' room, we would have been comfortable with anyone writing any of the episodes. On a new show, you spend so much time trying to figure out tone. Riz and I kept on putting off the finale so we could hone the earlier episodes, and that process dramatically changed the finale, even though we always knew we needed to get back to the Bond audition to bookend the series.

RM: What is it like to be the showrunner on a series where the lead is also the creator, and where so much of the material is drawn directly from his own life? Where do you push back, and where do you simply get out of the way?

BK: Riz was upfront about what he knew and what he didn't and vice versa. He is also a fast learner. I am a strong personality who will always give an opinion but ultimately defer to the vision of the person who created the show. The more you work with someone, the more you develop a rhythm and chemistry and shorthand. It really helps when you share a vision.

Karlin's instinct throughout this conversation is to deflate his own importance, and that lack of self-mythology is exactly what makes a project like this work. The finale was not written as a thesis statement. It was the last necessary thing standing between the room and a finished season, which is a far more honest way to land a story this strange.

RM: Bait premiered at Sundance 2026 and landed at SXSW before its Prime Video release, arriving with a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. What did it feel like in that first screening room when the audience encountered it for the first time?

BK: Being able to see your TV show in a giant theater with hundreds or even thousands of people is a gift I never take for granted. By the time Sundance rolled around, I had seen the show so much it had lost all meaning, so experiencing it vicariously through an audience literally brings it back to life for me. I just sit in the back and watch the audience. I get sad when they don't laugh where I want them to. But because I know the show is deep, I don't get too sad.

RM: Bait refuses to be a polemic. It is too funny and too human and too strange for that. How do you write into the territory of identity and belonging without the weight of the message crushing the comedy underneath it?

BK: This is actually the challenge I enjoy most in comedy. Going back to The Daily Show and then this movie I produced called 50/50, which was about cancer, I find it endlessly challenging to try and take subjects that are serious or depressing and re-contextualize them comedically. Sometimes it works and sometimes you fail nobly.

RM: Riz has described being brown in the West as sometimes feeling like you are stuck in a spy thriller. How did working on Bait feel different from anything you had made before, and what did it ask of you personally that your previous work had not?

BK: Bait was the first project I worked on where I was a total outsider to the world the characters inhabited. While I connected with the themes and the humanity of the story, the literal details were something I knew very little about. I found this thrilling, diving into a country, a culture, a religion, a history, you name it. It was humbling, especially as a showrunner.

RM: What is the most honest thing you can say about what co-showrunning actually looks like in practice? And what kind of story or collaboration would make you feel that whatever comes next is exactly the right thing?

BK: Honestly, I don't think running a show is a one-person job. Between running a writers' room, staffing the production, being on set, dealing with the studio and network, editing, postproduction, just find someone to do it with. Someone you like and respect and trust. My happiest experiences have been working with cool people, dividing the labor and enjoying the ride with partners.

The one thing I love about my career is that I remain very open to being surprised at what I am going to do next. You plan and plan and grow sure of what you will be working on, and then it is something else entirely. That's the closest you can feel to being an artist in a business that kind of hates art. I hope whatever I do next is as surprising to me as it is to the people watching.

Karlin says it himself without quite meaning to: no dickheads. It sounds like a throwaway line about staffing a writers room, but it is really a description of how Bait was made from the ground up. A room without ego, built around genuine curiosity rather than a fixed vision, willing to let a pig's head with Patrick Stewart's voice become one of the show's defining creative swings simply because it stuck.

What this conversation makes clear is that Bait's strangeness was never engineered. It emerged from a specific kind of trust: Riz Ahmed trusting a room of writers with the most exposed material of his own life, and Karlin trusting that the show could hold a title with four contradictory meanings, a James Bond audition, and a hallucinated pig without buckling under its own ambition. None of it sounds like a plan. All of it adds up to one.

Karlin spent decades learning economy and precision in rooms with no patience for self-indulgence, and then he spent his most personal project as a total outsider, humbled by a culture and a history that were not his own. The show that resulted is funny in the way only something honest can be funny, and it knows exactly when to leave before it overstays its welcome. I cannot wait to see what surprises him next.

Bait is streaming on Prime.