Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

I just finished watching Prime Video’s Bait, a new half-hour comedy created and showrun by Emmy winner Riz Ahmed. He’s great and relatable as Shah Latif, a British Pakistani actor from Wembley (Ahmed’s same home turf) who fumbles his audition for the role of James Bond, gets wrongly identified by British press outlets as the next Bond, and experiences an identity crisis and a mental breakdown when the journalistic flub leads to a second chance for him to audition as Bond.

Bait interested me because I grew up watching Bond movies on TBS (whereas my dad first watched Bond movies in theaters in the Philippines). The stunt where both Timothy Dalton’s double and Andreas Wisniewski’s double cling to a net hanging out the back of an actual cargo plane in midair (instead of clinging to a fake plane against back projection inside Pinewood Studios)—a highlight of The Living Daylights, a ’90s TBS staple—is a moment that still wows me.

Even though I don’t like most of the Bond movies nowadays for the same reason that Yasmin, Shah’s ex-girlfriend, doesn’t like them (however, Dalton is my favorite out of all the Bonds), I became such an expert on the history of Bond movie music—I always loved the scores the late John Barry and David Arnold composed for the franchise, and my favorite Bond opening theme song is Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill”—that I once considered writing a book about Bond movie music. I was going to self-publish it just like I did with the only non-fiction book I wrote so far.

I even had a title for the project: You Know My Twang. But I didn’t think it would interest anybody like Jon Burlingame’s The Music of James Bond did, and I thought that discussing the little musical touches that showed how Barry’s sound had evolved from 1962 to 1987 would bore the fuck out of readers, so I abandoned it.

Amazon now owns the screen rights to Bond and has complete creative control over the franchise that used to belong to the Broccolis. That was why I initially thought Bait was a show from the post-Broccoli regime that will make future Bond movies from now on—kind of like the unwatchable Prime Video reality show 007: Road to a Million, which was produced by the Broccolis before they sold their family business to Amazon.

But Bait isn’t a half-hour Prime Video advertisement for the post-Broccoli movies. The show is more deep and insightful than that, thanks to the writing skills of Ahmed and writers like Prashanth Venkataramanujam from Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and Azam Mahmood from Ramy.

On Bait, Bond is the jumping-off point for a comedic and sometimes dramatic exploration of what it means to be an actor of color in the U.K. The show imagines what it must be like for actors of color like Regé-Jean Page (who has become a more plausible choice for a Black Bond now that Idris Elba is too old to play him) and Dev Patel (whom Shah keeps getting mistaken for by white folks) whenever the press or the internet stirs up talk about how great they would be as Bond.

In addition to depicting the usual racist trolls who gatekeep a role that was always previously played by white guys, Bait wonders if actors of color ever experience guilt about being interested in the role of a white neocolonial MI6 agent. That’s exactly how Yasmin, a documentary filmmaker played by Ritu Arya from The Umbrella Academy, describes Bond in a beautifully directed (by Tom George) episode where Shah confronts Yasmin about her op-ed on why the world doesn’t need a Brown Bond (and then realizes—over the course of one Eid night in London—how badly he screwed up their relationship).

Yasmin’s op-ed mirrors Boots Riley’s real-life argument that Black actors shouldn’t aspire to be Bond.

“Stop making intelligence operatives/assassins/murderers look cool, and trying to make ppl [sic] of color feel connection to these enemies of the ppl [sic]. You want a Black hero? Don’t make them an agent of capital,” tweeted Riley in 2019.

Shah does experience fears about being called a coconut who rejects his culture to please white folks. In addition to those fears, he stresses out over the second chance to audition. That stressfulness ignites long-buried resentments he has with his Muslim family, particularly Zulfi, one of two cousins Shah’s parents took in after their mum’s institutionalization.

When they were kids, Zulfi bravely fought back against skinheads who bullied Shah for being Pakistani. Zulfi, who works as a rideshare driver, is played by Guz Khan, whom I first encountered when he voiced Andy Samberg’s initial nemesis on Samberg and Neil Campbell’s adult animated sitcom Digman!, an amusing mash-up of Indiana Jones and National Treasure. Khan and Ahmed have great buddy movie chemistry.

Shah’s mind starts to unravel in fantasy sequences that bring to mind both Hollywood Shuffle and Mr. Robot. If you’re a fan of both Robert Townsend’s extremely quotable 1987 satire about Black stereotypes and Sam Esmail’s show about a mixed-race hacker who suffers from dissociative identity disorder, Bait will appeal to you. Shah’s journey to his second audition, which doesn’t take too long to binge-watch, ends with a surprisingly moving coda that reminds you why Ahmed earned an Emmy for his role on The Night Of and then was nominated multiple times for his terrific performance in Sound of Metal.

One of Bait’s guest stars is Himesh Patel, who appears in one episode as Raj Thakker, Shah’s British Indian showbiz rival. Patel happens to be experiencing nearly the same thing Shah experiences on Bait: The day after Prime Video dropped all six episodes of Bait, Patel was announced as the lead actor opposite Danielle Deadwyler in the X-Files reboot pilot that will be filmed for Hulu to consider picking up as a new series, and MAGAts immediately whined about the casting of Deadwyler and Patel.

But Patel’s period of entry into the previously not-so-inclusive X-Files franchise will probably be less stressful than Shah’s experiences as a possible new Bond on Bait. That’s most likely because he will be playing a new character instead of a 73-year-old character who comes with a lot of neocolonial baggage.

The recently announced pairing of Deadwyler and Patel is why the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the late Mark Snow’s “Closure” from the montage that humorously and elegantly wrapped up 1996’s “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.’ ” “Closure” is my second favorite instrumental Snow composed for The X-Files, right below “Eaten by Light” from 1995’s “Soft Light.”

The X-Files reboot pilot will be a mini-Station Eleven reunion. Both Deadwyler and Patel appeared in that limited series.

I never watched Station Eleven. But I’m a fan of the Station Eleven scene where Patel and Matilda Lawler vibe out to Nabhaan Rizwan—another South Asian actor who has a role on Bait—rapping along to the beat of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions” because I grew up listening to ATCQ. I remember listening to both The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders on cassette during long-ass Bay Area bus rides to high-school field trips.

I also grew up watching The X-Files. I often enjoyed the show’s monster-of-the-week half—just like I later did when I got into Kolchak: The Night Stalker, the biggest influence on The X-Files, when it was on the Sci-Fi Channel—while I wasn’t so big on the mythology half and the show’s most racist episodes. X-Files reboot showrunner Jennifer Yale co-showran Peacock’s The Copenhagen Test, a spy-fi show that has an edge over the fictional Bond movie Shah auditions for on Bait because it cast Simu Liu, who’s Chinese Canadian, as the central character and then worked his background as a son of immigrants into his character’s backstory. The news that Yale will leave behind Mulder and Scully and start clean makes me happy. It will give Deadwyler and Patel room to do their own thing. I can’t wait.

Gillian Anderson—who wasn’t happy with what X-Files creator Chris Carter did to Scully at the end of the 2016-18 X-Files sequel series that reunited her with David Duchovny, Mitch Pileggi, and William B. Davis—is enthusiastic about the reboot pilot script after she got to read it. (It’s unlikely that she’ll appear in the pilot.) Her praise of the script is also encouraging news.

Ryan Coogler once said he made Creed for his dad, while the X-Files reboot pilot he’ll be directing will be meant for his mom. God, I hope this pilot will be as excellent as Sinners. I can’t take another rejection of a star-studded attempt to revisit a beloved ’90s sci-fi or fantasy franchise and avoid repeating some of its worst mistakes, especially after that week when Hulu rejected Chloé Zhao’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale sequel series pilot and Paramount+ canceled the surprisingly solid but divisive Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the aforementioned Boots Riley—who hails from Oakland like Coogler does and is a very leftist Black filmmaker whose progressiveness goes all the way back to his days as the frontman of the Coup—doesn’t think much of the addition of Deadwyler to the X-Files franchise just because she’ll be playing an FBI agent. However, the argument from the anti-copaganda crowd—God, I hate the overused word “copaganda,” and now people are trying to make “wealthaganda” a thing, but I’d rather call it “guapaganda” instead of “wealthaganda” because it’s catchier—that The X-Files is Copa Miranda is kind of silly to me.

The X-Files rarely portrayed the FBI in a positive light. As the X-Files end credits always said, “This production has not been approved, endorsed, or authorized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The agency never assisted in the making of The X-Files, unlike how the LAPD is deeply involved in the production of the cop show Dropout’s anti-Copacabana fans hate the most: ABC’s long-running LAPD Carmen Miranda show The Rookie.

If The X-Files is Copa Miranda, then I’m a pointy-eared sub-commander from planet Romulus.