Tom George is good at letting comedy become uncomfortable without losing sight of the people making it funny. We recommend his work on Bait, though its polish sometimes makes distress look too neatly managed.
Fi1m perspective
In Bait (2026), an actor's efforts to win a job and please his family are enough to make comedy uncomfortable. Tom George directs three episodes of the series, sharing directing duties with Bassam Tariq. Their shifts into psychological thriller mostly keep Shah's anxiety from becoming repetitive. This is assured comic direction, though we prefer the quieter family scenes to the more polished presentation of his distress.
George's breakthrough was This Country (2017–2020), directing all 19 episodes with actor-writers Charlie Cooper and Daisy May Cooper. His feature debut, See How They Run (2022), moved into a 1950s whodunnit, with a script by Mark Chappell. That is a sizeable change of setting and format, but his emphasis on character comedy and actors' improvisation provides a useful connection. Two episodes of The Franchise (2024), a satire of superhero film production, continued the interest in entertainment looking at its own workings. The risk with such material is that recognising the joke can become more important than caring about the person caught in it.
Bait mostly avoids that problem by making the actor's family pressures matter as much as his hopes of a job. We were more unsettled by the family scenes than by the thriller flourishes, because the pressure to satisfy everyone made Shah's anxiety painfully understandable. George's preference for allowing actors to find specifics within a script is well suited to this sort of comedy. Some supporting characters still deserve more attention, and no amount of tonal variety makes up for that.
Frank Lamm and Dan Atherton's cinematography and Steve Summersgill's production design give Bait a polish appropriate to a story about an actor under scrutiny. They also help explain our reservation: the distress can look too tidily presented. Those choices belong to a collaboration, and George should not receive sole credit or blame for them. He is worth following for the attention he gives to performance, with some caution about how insistently the production announces a change of mood. Start with Bait for the family comedy rather than expecting the thriller to be its strongest attraction.
Biography
Tom George is a British director of film and television. He directed all 19 episodes of the BBC comedy series This Country (2017–2020), on which he also received a story credit, and for which the show won four BAFTA awards including Best Scripted Comedy.
His feature directorial debut was the 2022 comedy See How They Run, which was nominated for Outstanding British Film at the BAFTAs. Other credits include directing episodes of Defending the Guilty (2018–2019), Sherwood (2024), The Franchise (2024), three episodes of the series Bait (2026), and serving as lead director on the 2026 mini-series Two Weeks in August.
