Judith and Debbie have been best friends for twenty years. They travel together, they haunt antique shops, they belong to the same book club. Debbie believes Judith is a forensic accountant. Judith is actually a contract killer who has spent those same twenty years billing millions to a shadow agency for the people she makes vanish. Ride or Die, the eight-episode series that dropped all at once on Prime Video on July 15, rests on that single lie, and on the friendship the lie has been living inside all along.
The reviews have been polite and a little tired. Variety called it a middling action dramedy, The Wrap filed it under standard buddy comedy, and almost everyone agreed the plot is overstuffed and the villains run thin. But almost everyone also agreed on the exception, and that is the part worth paying attention to. Whatever the show gets wrong, the two women at the center of it are the real thing.
The Action Is the Disguise
Ride or Die is shot like a spy thriller. Peyton Reed, who made the Ant-Man movies, directs the first two episodes, and he stages the car chases and the fight choreography with real competence. Judith kills a man in an early episode with the offhand efficiency of someone clocking out of a shift, and the show plainly enjoys watching Hannah Waddingham move through a gunfight. But the action is the disguise, not the point. Take away the assassins, the Albanian mob, and the double crosses, and the series is left with something quieter and harder. Twenty years of friendship, and one day one of you learns the other has been someone else the entire time. What happens then?
The Best Friends Had Never Met
Here is the detail that reframes the whole series. The creator, Tessa Coates, wrote both parts for these two actresses specifically; in interviews she says the casting "was just always for them." And yet Waddingham and Spencer had never met before the shoot. The lived-in, two-decade friendship that every critic singled out as the show's best quality was built from nothing, in Prague, by two women who were strangers on their first day. By the end of production they had grown close enough that both now talk about it the way you talk about a real friend. Neither pushed for top billing over the other; both took executive producer credits and left it at that. There is something almost circular in it. The series is about a friendship one half of it does not fully know, played by two people who were still learning each other, so that the getting-to-know-you the characters finished decades ago was happening for real between takes. The ease critics mistook for twenty years of history was two actors falling into step for the first time, with the cameras rolling.
Waddingham Plays Against Everything You Know Her For
That casting matters because of who these two are onscreen everywhere else. Waddingham became a household name as Rebecca in Ted Lasso, all warmth and wounded grandeur, a woman who mostly needs a hug. Here she is the one holding the gun, and she plays Judith's coldness as a kind of exhaustion, the fatigue of keeping a second life sealed off for two decades. Spencer, who has spent a career playing the moral center of other people's stories, is cast as the one in the dark, the friend being protected from a truth she never asked about. The show keeps its subplots too busy and lets its mob heavies stay cardboard, and I felt the sag around the midpoint. None of that touches the center. When the two of them are in a room together, the writing around them stops mattering.
Come for the Chase, Stay for Them
Yes, if you know what you are tuning in for. Come for a slick European chase and you will get a decent one, with two movie stars visibly enjoying each other. Come for the friendship and you will get something the plot machinery around it never quite deserves. The finale, an episode called The Song of Deborah, sets down most of the thriller and turns its full attention to the two of them, to whether Debbie can stay once she knows exactly who her best friend is. I will not spoil how it gets there, but the emotional answer is never really in doubt. She stays, and the warmth of that certainty is the reason it works. Ride or Die is a modest action comedy with a large, generous heart, and its best trick happened off camera. Two women who had just met made a friendship convincing enough to anchor eight hours of television, and walked away actually friends. You can feel it in every scene. It is the rare show that is warmer than its own genre lets on.
If you like a magnetic lead who can carry a thriller further than its script has any right to, another recent one leans its whole weight on a single unreadable face.
And if it is the bond between the women that keeps you watching, not the plot around them, another recent story puts its real weight in the same place.