I'm Tired of Bullshit Prestige

Mistaking what it is for what it looks like

A few nights ago, as I was once again doing the worst thing possible—packing up my house—I was on the phone with my friend. I’d called her because I hate packing, it makes me depressed and brings up all my existential thoughts, and I needed someone to talk to so I wouldn’t go crazy.

We were talking about BAIT, which we had both recently watched. At one point, she said, “I think that we’ve broken surrealism.”

To which we both promptly, died laughing.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with a lot of different TV shows and movies that have been buzzworthy but have existed in a kind of trendiness that I find boring. I thought about this with I LOVE LA, DIE MY LOVE, HIM, and OPUS among others. Everything feels like it’s trying to be a Safdie film, or Atlanta, without maybe understanding why these things work in the first place. It feels like

the Tik Tokification of art—just trying to mimic a recipe for success that has come before and using vibes as a filter, rather than leaning into actual innovation.

This difference—what is being gleaned as a recipe ‘success’ rather than actual innovation—is something that I have been talking to my students a lot about lately. Here, I’ll use Bait as a primary example to talk about what I struggle with in the former camp, and Atlanta and Toni Morrison to highlight things I feel in the secondary camp. And while I know that Toni Morrison writes in a vastly different genre than Bait (both in terms of literature and prestige), I look to her because I think she has a quite masterful approach to craft and her logic behind crafting, that I think we, as a society, need to remember.

I think of the poet Terrance Haye’s quote, “never mistake what it is for what it looks like.” Under the smoke and mirrors of prestige aesthetic, I fear we have lost the plot.

My primary critique of Bait is that it feels like a show that is about an (underbaked) idea of community, rather than moving with the heart or evolution of the main character.

I will start by saying that I really wanted to like this show. Desperately. I love seeing South Asian people and Muslim people and people of color make beautiful art. I watched Bait with a group of friends and after the second episode everyone wanted to turn it off and watch something else. Because I am South Asian and Muslim and we have very few shows about us, I watched it on my own. I liked the third episode, and then really struggled to get through the rest of the series.

In the show, there’s actually very little plot in what happens. It is about a character unraveling in his own mind, but when I compare it to shows about a similar conceit like I MAY DESTROY YOU, it doesn’t hold up. So much of BAIT rested in episodes where plot decisions could have been avoided if the main character texted someone. Bait is only three hours of storytelling—that’s quite fast. To have any wasted space on a show like that, or plot points that don’t really make sense and are just chalked up to ‘comedic absurdity’ feels like a letdown. In TV, where every minute is so precious, it ended up coming across as a lack of story and depth, and making artistic choices that underutilized character interiority to create plot, instead opting for what seems trendy or topical.

The show also tries to create James Bond-esque structure and visuals to what it’s doing, but the plot feels so underdeveloped that it’s hard to take it seriously. I felt the show was lacking believable stakes—Shahjahan goes on a James Bond fueled mission to find his missing family in lieu of…. just texting them? When his dad just fainted the scene before that Shahjahan was present for? Watching Bait it just felt like there were no stakes that were actually believable or made me feel empathy for the main character. And this was surprising giving the conceit of Bait; an actor goes on an audition that could fundamentally change his and his family’s life if he got the part, and looses himself on the way. There are real stakes there, but they don’t come across in the show in a tangible way.

Racially, the second episode was on the nose in a way that was hard to watch in 2026. I watched it with my friends—all who were people of color but none of whom were South Asian—and everyone struggled with how reductive the racial discussion in the show was. The show felt like it was using dated conversations about identity that feel like they belong to something that existed maybe ten or fifteen years ago.

I was in a poetry workshop years ago with Willie Perdomo, and he said something about how he was tired of seeing people of color name white people as their only villains. I agree, and something Bait tries to tackle is other brown people, and brown community, as villains. But, it does so while Shahjehan desperately tries to escape into whiteness—by literally being the trope of James Bond—and never points a critical eye to any of the oppressive structures that exist. There is a scene where the main character considers killing off his entire family because they are holding him back, which is said to him by his Black agent. But there’s never any real engagement of any of the white characters as being a problem to the Shahjehan, including the white M15 (or M16) agent who quite literally tries to get the him to spy on his community for them. His emotional growth feels hollow because he tries to apologize to his cousin by going to a TSA agent and trying to convince the TSA agent that his cousin—who has been established to have a criminal record and have been in jail—is a terrorist. Again, no actual stakes play out around this, and his cousin tells him he was always coming back in 4 days, not leaving indefinitely, to which Shahjehan basically just shrugs off. By the end of the series, when Shahjehan blows everyone away with his audition only to bomb it by saying his own name rather than Bond’s name at the end, it’s supposed to represent the character choosing his own community over whiteness. In execution, it doesn’t actually feel real or earned. Instead, it reads as the most cringe—and unfortunately last line—in the whole series.

(from Dev Patel’s Monkey Man)

In the first episode, Shahjehan is compared to Dev Patel. And unfortunately, the whole time I was watching the show I kept thinking about how Dev Patel didn’t whine about James Bond not being brown, he just created an action movie where he actually played a culturally specific brown James Bond character (in Monkey Man), which was such a joy to watch. This is what makes him our brown king. I know that they are vastly different genres, but to me, it gets at the major issue I had with Bait, that it felt like it was a show that was trying to be important without doing any of the intellectual or craft work that would have set it apart. One of the characters asks, “does James Bond deserve to be Muslim?” The question is never answered. But really, a better question would be, “does this specific man deserve to be the James Bond we, as Muslims, can finally put our hope in?” And perhaps this is what the show is really lacking—that a character striving to be the brown James Bond without actually caring about his community or his community’s concerns, a character that is too caught up in his own striving for success at the expense of everyone around him— could never be what Kid is in Monkey Man, or what we hope a character like James Bond could be to so many of us. I would have loved to see Shahjahan becomes the James Bond his community needed. Instead, he flails in his narcissism.

I (think I) know what the writers of Bait were reaching for—trying to use surrealism to explore mental health, distance and loneliness from community, and narcissism. Trying to use the pigs head to represent white logic, and its demise in the car crash and Shahjehan’s subsequent breakdown as his awakening. Trying to present Shahjehan as a character that starts out self-serving and then opens up to community and family and their importance in his life.

On paper, this is the exact show I would sign up to watch. In execution, I found myself embarrassed watching it. It felt hollow and threadbare. I think about shows who use that kind of prestige, surrealism or absurdity as an exploration of mental health, trauma, ambition, and spirituality so well—shows like ATLANTA or I MAY DESTROY YOU or RESERVATION DOGS or MO, or even to a certain extent, FLEABAG.

What I loved about Atlanta, was that structurally, the show presented a bait and switch. It hooked audiences with a pilot that tricked us into thinking the show would go one way, but then pushed against that. Donald Glover has talked about Trojan Horsing the show past the executives, because they knew that executives wouldn’t let a show like theirs exist on air. Unfortunately, Bait seems like the exact kind of show white executives want on air, because it holds up a status quo while giving a dated and underbaked racial argument. While (white) folks deemed Atlanta as ‘surreal,’ it actually felt more like magical realism—using a lyricism that was created specifically for the show but in the lineage of Black artistry, to make viewers contend with the absurdity of reality, of being Black in a white supremacist nation. The combination of those elements is what made it prestige, and what made it groundbreaking. Contrastingly, the surrealism in Bait does nothing to push the conversation about South Asianness or Muslimness in the west, therefore, it doesn’t feel earned.

It’s that distinction that makes it seem like Bait is reaching for an aesthetic of prestige rather than actually being prestige. Bait wants to be clever. It wants so hard to be sharp and cutting edge. And it’s perhaps its own lack of awareness of its own execution that makes it feel difficult to watch. Bait mistakes what it is for what it looks like.

Recently, while in a discussion about book titles, a friend of mine said that people conflate cleverness with sincerity. Cleverness, the want to be clever, will always fail. It is a fundamentally boring project. The want to be sincere, the want to be real and truthful, is where art comes alive.

One of my friends and mentors, Krista Franklin, once said to me, “there is too much shit in the world to be putting out mediocre art.” When she said it, I felt like tattooing it on my forehead so everyone could read it. And for the love of Allah and all things that are beautiful, I really wish everyone (including myself) would take that advice.

A different mentor I had growing up once said to me, “you have to make your art unfuckwithable.” What does that mean to me? It means that in striving to create, I want to make and consume art that upholds by the logic that it creates, and rests in heart and spirit. We cannot reach for prestige aesthetics without spirit. We cannot only pursue an intellectual or aesthetic enterprise without heart to back up our decisions. But it also means that we have to engage with the past and the lineages that come before us. If we want to use surrealism, we have to use it in a way that is deeply woven into the logic of the piece, not as a filter we reach for to seem prestigious to hide our craft decisions.

(from the movie Jallikattu— a South Asian movie that does surrealism, comedy and thriller really well)

I don’t think we’ve broken surrealism. More, I think that a lot of people just really don’t understand what the fuck surrealism is. In their lack of understanding, they reach for something that seems cool or edgy, but, like Bait, is really a shortcut to craft and storytelling and goes for vibes over content.

I had this conversation with one of my friends who is a professor of poetry, and was saying that she was noticing a trend in her students work. They all were bringing in visual poems that weren’t really engaging with intentionality of craft, they seemed more to be spurred from the students wanting to seem edgy and experimental. The root cause of this? The success of our beloved, Danez Smith’s book, BLUFF. Of course, that’s to be expected to a certain extent: something is deemed as successful and a thousand people rush to ride the tails of that success.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about when I feel like something is earned in a piece of art. Every piece of art is. It exists. It creates its own piece of logic that it invites us into. What I really mean when I say ‘earned’ is: Is the piece in its own integrity? Does it follow through on its own ‘is-ness’?

Does it hold its own logic? And where does it break its own logic? Is that breaking intentional, or is it random? That, to me, is worldbuilding. That’s what makes art sharp, vs making it feel hollow.

I gave a talk recently to our Ministry of Words cohorts on Lyricism and Spirit, focusing on creating art from a place of spirituality and intuition, and how to listen to that voice, and allow that voice to lead you to structure. Fundamentally, I believe that writing is smarter than we are, and that if we listen to the tension in the line, it will guide us to where we want to go. Intellectually, I think this concept is hard for people to understand. But that is because it is not an intellectual concept. It is a spiritual one. You have to live it, you have to experience it, in order to understand it.

After the talk, one of the students was saying that they have a hard time with craft because they associate it with white supremacy. And that it brings up a lot around feeling like they were at odds with racist standards that are often wielded to make people of color feel like their work is bad.

As someone who has both existed in and been pushed out of artistic spaces and institutions that adhere to white supremacist notions of craft, I deeply understand that fear, and resistance to, craft. However, what I told the student, was that I felt like it was a conflation of craft and technique that I see in our society at large.

Technique and technical precision, as taught by white organizations, is the mimicry of an identified form that has been deemed as successful. Where this gets tricky is when this becomes the default—or only—avenue of what is considered the way to tell a story.

So, for example: a three-act dramatic structure. The technicality of an inciting incident, a midpoint, and a climax. In poetry—the technicality of a sonnet: 14 lines, volta, couplets. The technicality of a ghazal: couplets, repeating end word to the couplets, the turn in the last line to implicate the author. These are all technical elements that create structure based on forms that we have inherited and are in lineage with as storytellers.

However, that is not the end all for craft. Craft is when you let the tension of the content create the structure of the piece that you are working on, and all of the decisions that you make to shape the working of the piece itself, and allow the piece to shine in its worldbuilding and is-ness. How does the emotional tension of the poem affect the couplets? How does it drive the scene? Craft is the intention in which you shape the things you are bringing to life by being an artistic witness, by shaping that into a way that moves an audience, that makes them feel, that makes them, hopefully, a bit more human. And by allowing a real, total, and full engagement of the content in the piece to allow for a unique structure to be birthed, one that feels both surprising and inevitable in the piece you have created.

I think a lot about Toni Morrison in this. Toni has famously only written one short story—RECITATIF—that follows two women, one Black and one white, who grew up together. The story was written around the conceit that Toni had that she wanted to write a story where you couldn’t tell which girl was which race. This craft decision affects the piece throughout—it’s an incredibly smart and evocative piece of writing because it defies stereotype, and it does so while not revealing the race of the characters but making their racial conflict the central antagonizing tension in the story.

On a craft level, this piece is brilliant because the content and project of the story informs the structure and the driving conflict in the work. It knows exactly what it’s doing. And from that, its unique craft is born.

Toni Morrison has a concept of ‘re-memory’ that she explores in her book BELOVED. She writes;

“Mindful of and rebellious towards the cultural and racial expectations and impositions my fiction would encourage, it was important for me not to reveal, that is, reinforce, already established reality (literary or historical) that the reader and I agree upon beforehand. I could not, without engaging in another kind of cultural totalising process, assume or exercise that kind of authority. It was in Beloved that all of these matters coalesced for me in new and major ways. History versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness.

Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative. The effort to both remember and not know became the structure of the text.”

In the book, the structure is derived from the tension in the content—the tension between remembering and not knowing. It is there that Toni cuts a path for us, it is there that Beloved finds it’s home. It is there that Beloved becomes undeniable.

When we reach for things that have become trendy—surrealism, visual poems, chaotic conflict—we need to slow down and understand WHY we are reaching for it, what it allows us, how our content informs the structure that we are using, and fundamentally, if we betray ourselves and our work with our choices, or if they are earned. We can’t mistake what it is for what it looks like. We can’t reach for aesthetic or vibe without intention. We have to let what it is lead us to the way, the truth, the structure of what we are birthing.