The buddy-assassin dramedy is done after one season, even as reports suggest the studio is shopping it to other buyers before writing it off entirely.
Prime Video has pulled the plug on Ride or Die after just one season, Variety confirmed Saturday. The buddy-assassin dramedy starring Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham premiered in July, barely two months before the axe fell.
The show followed Debbie Claybourne (Spencer) and Judith Burton (Waddingham), two best friends who discover, rather inconveniently, that one of them is an international assassin. A hit goes wrong, and the pair end up on the run across Europe with cops, hired killers and assorted criminals on their tail. It's a premise that sounds like it was built for multiple seasons of chase sequences and one-liners.
That won't happen now. Or maybe it will, just not on Amazon's dime. The Times of India, citing its own sources, reported that despite what it called strong viewership and warm audience reaction, the studio is actively shopping the series to other buyers rather than letting it die outright. Variety's report, on the other hand, frames this plainly as a cancellation, full stop, with no mention of a shopping process. Where the two accounts land differently is worth noting, since one suggests Ride or Die could resurface on a rival platform and the other treats it as over.
The casting news itself is old news, technically. Spencer and Waddingham were first linked to the project back in December 2023, which means this show spent the better part of three years in development before audiences got even a season of it. The supporting cast wasn't thin either. Ed Skrein, Calam Lynch, Savannah Steyn, Jamie Parker and Jacky Ido rounded things out, with Sylvia Hoeks and Bill Nighy also on board.
Tessa Coates created the series and ran it as showrunner alongside Matt Miller, with Peyton Reed directing. The production had real muscle behind it: Paramount Television Studios and Amazon MGM Studios co-produced with Andy and Barbara Muschietti's Double Dream and Spencer's own Orit Entertainment. That's not a lineup you'd expect to fold after eight or ten episodes.
Critics weren't exactly cold on it either. Variety's own review called out the chemistry between the two leads, comparing the central dynamic to Thelma & Louise, and singled out Waddingham's turn as a full-blown action star as something worth watching regularly. Reviews like that usually buy a show at least one more season's worth of goodwill.
So what happens next depends entirely on which report you believe. If Prime Video really is done with it, that's the end of Debbie and Judith's road trip. If the TOI account holds and the show is being shopped around, someone else's Friday lineup might inherit it. Either way, nobody's confirmed a Season 2 pickup anywhere, and until a network says otherwise, this one's in limbo.
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