Riz Ahmed has been known for bringing something new to the screen, and that too, with a socially relevant story to complement, and his recent show, Bait, is not different. If you watched it and are enamored by the impact, story, and themes, you can still explore a lot. Bait is basically a dark comedy that seesaw constantly between satire and breakdown, with every joke feeling like it’s concealing something heavier.
What makes Bait different is that it takes absurdity and applies it to actual fears about success, cultural identity, and what you are worth as a person. The narratives lean into surreal scenarios and awkward comedy, making for an experience that’s as chaotic as it is intimate.
If that style of cringing, commenting, and character-driven craziness worked for you, here are five dark comedies, some straight from your comments list, that tap a similar vein.
Riz Ahmed’s Bait got you hooked? These are 5 similar dark comedy shows
1. Atlanta
Donald Glover’s Atlanta teeters between earthy storytelling and surreal detours, tracing Earn as he maneuvers through the rap world and his own path. Much like Bait, it feeds on unpredictability; you can feel absurd, dreamlike, or fall into moments of intense introspection as it captures the weird mismatch between ambition and reality while humourously accentuating struggles surrounding identity and societal expectations.
2. Barry
This show centers on the protagonist, Barry, a hitman, whose bid to become an actor turns into a downward spiral of violence, remorse, and denial. The show is also representative of Bait’s obsession with performance in its myriad forms, onscreen, and in life, with the key character’s desperation to shape his own narrative, revealing further fractures, and this is how the show mixes dismal subject matter with suitable humor.
3. Fleabag
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag is a masterclass in transforming personal collapse into scalpel-sharp humour, chasing its central character through grief, isolation and self-harm as she breaks the fourth wall the show isn’t just about the story, the character’s struggle and humor that she deals her life with, the making of the show with unique kind of storytelling as also a point to be praised aming the critics.
4. Ramy
Ramy focuses on faith, identity, and contemporary relationships via a central character who is perpetually torn between his principles and his desires. With its dark humor and ethical complexity, this is very much in the spirit of Bait, featuring a protagonist whose quests for meaning often mislead him into greater bewilderment, where every decision seems undeniably personal yet overwhelmingly cultural.
5. BoJack Horseman
Although it’s animated, BoJack Horseman is one of the most incisive examinations of fame, depression, and worth in recent memory. Therefore, the themes of Bait and this show stand on similar grounds. Like the new show, it deconstructs the notion of success, revealing how validation from the outside can’t heal from the inside, with jokes that feel cutting, self-lacerating, and quietly ruinous.
These are not dissimilar to Ahmed’s show in that they teeter on a knife-edge between comedic and crisis, causing laughs even as the characters implode. They linger not because they are funny, but because they are brutally truthful.
Edited by Amey Mirashi