• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, May 28, 2026

A new series coming to Amazon Prime in July has a woman discovering that her best friend is … wait for it … an international assassin!

At least the show -- titled “Ride or Die” -- is billed as a comedy -- specifically an “action-comedy.”

“ ‘Ride or Die’ follows best friends Debbie Claybourne [Octavia Spencer] and Judith Burton [Hannah Waddingham, photo above] who thought they knew everything about each other, except Judith turns out to be an international assassin,” says an Amazon press release. 

“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,” the release goes on.

Sounds pretty serious, what with all the highly trained assassins and dangerous criminals on their tails.

But I am reasonably confident that the makers of “Ride or Die” have found a way to have fun with the situation. (I promise to watch the show in advance of its July 15 premiere date.)

Positioning the show as a comedy is a shrewd way to go about it because depictions of assassins for hire in TV shows (and also movies) are absurd.

More often than not, the men are tousle-haired hunks and the women are statuesque beauties. 

Both genders in the profession of murdering people are always sexy. I ask you, who’s sexier than Keanu Reeves in the role of John Wick as he kills hundreds of people in the four “John Wick” movies? It makes no sense, but there it is.

The Fox series “Memory of a Killer” boasts the most conspicuous killer for hire on TV at the moment -- Angelo Doyle, played by Patrick Dempsey, the actor once known as “McDreamy” on “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The title refers to the show’s premise: In his public-facing life, Angelo claims to be a copier salesman, but in reality, he’s a hitman. Oh, and he also has early-onset Alzheimer’s.

The TV Blog has opined more than once that the premise is ridiculous, but Fox has renewed the show for a second season.

It is not as though real-life contract killers do not exist. They do. Wikipedia even has a “contract killing” page.

“Contract killings generally make up a small percentage of murders,” the page says. It also says that the most common reason for murder-for-hire is insurance policy payouts.

In the murder-for-hire TV shows and movies, the targets are a lot sexier than spouses with life insurance. 

The targets are sometimes heads of state such as a dictator, but more often they are crime kingpins. And if you happen to shoot and miss one, heaven help you.

The Wikipedia page makes a distinction between contract killers and serial killers. “Contract killers may share similarities with serial killers, such as detached financial and emotional incentives, but are not classified as such due to the differing objectives of their crimes,” it says.

Typical assassins on TV may or not regret their killings, but when they retire, they just want to be left alone.

That was the premise of “The Assassin,” an AMC+ series that came out last year. In this one, a woman lived peacefully on a remote Greek isle, apparently in retirement from a career as a Ninja-like hitwoman in the 1990s.

In the show, her estranged grown son came to visit her, and soon found out that his mother is (or was) … wait for it … a hitwoman! 

That sounds like the new Amazon comedy “Ride or Die,” but “The Assassin” was anything but funny. In the first scene, a rival assassin gunned down most of the island’s Greek residents.

Come to think of it, TV’s depictions of hitpersons have leaned toward the comical more than the tragical.

One recent comedy series about murder was 2020’s “Hitmen,” produced in Britain and starring Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins as a pair of hitwomen. 

The pair were previously best known as co-hosts of “The Great British Baking Show.” On “Hitmen,” they “swapped glazed buns for silenced guns,” wrote The Guardian at the time.

HBO’s “Barry,” starring Bill Hader was also a comedy hitman series, but “The Day of the Jackal” on Peacock was not. The “Jackal” show was OK, but the movie was better.