Ride or Die
Dušan Martinček/Prime
As ever, we are all looking for something to watch in any given week, and now, there’s a new 95% Rotten Tomatoes-scored show live that you may want to check out. Surprisingly enough, it’s not on Apple TV, where that tier is practically average at this point.
Like Apple’s Widow’s Bay, this is another comedy. It’s called Ride or Die, and Amazon has dumped out all eight episodes onto Prime Video already, something it sometimes does in order to grab an audience right away.
Ride or Die pairs Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham and Hidden Figures/The Help/Fruitvale Station’s Oscar-winning Octavia Spencer, who has been attached to countless great projects, as shown. And clearly, Ride or Die is another one. What’s it all about? Here’s the official synopsis:
“Ride or Die follows best friends Debbie Claybourne and Judith Burton who thought they knew everything about each other, except Judith turns out to be an international assassin. When a mysterious figure emerges from Judith’s past and a hit goes horribly wrong, both of their worlds are turned upside down as they’re forced to go on the run together. It’s a race against time and a road trip across Europe, with law enforcement, highly trained assassins, and some very dangerous criminals at their heels.”
Ride or Die
Rotten Tomatoes
Judith would be Waddingham and Debbie is Octavia Spencer, which sets up that dynamic. It’s pretty easy to see the enigmatic, British Hannah Waddingham as a spy, though this is far from James Bond, given that it’s a buddy comedy.
It is pretty hard for most comedies to rack up such high critic scores, given how subjective humor can be, but this has landed well for Amazon. The service does not have many shows in this genre putting up these kinds of numbers. As for a potential season 2, the series is already #1 on Amazon’s top 10 list, unseating Legally Blonde prequel Elle and megahit romance series Off Campus. That’s about as good as a premiere as you could hope for. Ride or Die was not auto-greenlit for season 2, but it stands to reason it has a pretty good shot at one if it maintains this level of popularity. And what streaming service wouldn’t want to be competing with Apple’s Widow Bay and Shrinking? And ironically, doing so using one of its biggest actors taken from Ted Lasso itself. Pretty funny turn of events there.
You can check out all episodes of Ride or Die on Amazon now, and see if it lives up to the critical hype.
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