Ride or Die, Prime Video’s new eight-part series starring Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer, is loud, silly, funny, escapist and as moreish as the popcorn that it deserves to be paired with.

Since when does a show about people who kill for a living have the right to be so enjoyable? Maybe since posturing, humourless and amoral sharpshooter men, ostensibly saving the world from bad guys, passed the baton – and their weapons – to their female counterparts.

The premise here is that Judith Burton (Waddingham) has led a secret life for 20-plus years as a professional assassin, codenamed Whiptail, for an MI6-type spy outfit. It’s a secret that not even her bestie, Debbie (Octavia Spencer), has any inkling of. This is despite their ability to finish each other’s sentences, correctly guess if a contestant on Antiques Roadshow owns trash or treasure, and rescue each other from sanctimonious snobs at their weekly book club.

While Whiptail has kept her shadow life secret (“I kill people for a living,” she finally blurts out), Debbie, who is American, has spent the past 20 years of hers raising children and steering the political career of her dimwit husband (Jamie Parker). That is, until her wet-eared husband, who is on the cusp of becoming the next prime minister, casually reveals he’s divorcing her and has taken money from the kinds of people that Whiptail hunts down.

After a hit gone wrong, Whiptail is handed an assignment to redeem herself and, before you know it, Debbie and Whiptail are dodging bullets and Albanian mobsters, having deep and meaningful conversations about their friendship and trying to find the bad guys who want to take them out, which involves numerous shootouts across a range of glamorous, postcard-perfect European backdrops and guilt-free trysts with younger men.

Along with her immaculate wardrobe and coiffure, Waddingham infuses her character with sass, brassiness and sly humour. “Where’s the showmanship?” she asks when instructed to poison her next target.

Debbie, who really is the smartest person in the room, never misses the chance for a throwaway quip and to serve comeuppance to anyone who doubts her. And behind the humour and cartoony spectacle there’s the burning indignation of two women who have been underestimated, disregarded and mistreated, and won’t be bound by social and marital expectations.

“You’re a WOACA – you turned 50 and started acting out,” Whiptail’s insipid young handler tells her in a tone that suggests that’s a problem.

Understandably, Ride or Die is frequently compared to Killing Eve, the groundbreaking thriller co-created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Emerald Fennell (among others) that aired between 2018 and 2022. There, Jodie Comer played a ruthless and wonderfully demented psychopath named Villanelle who works for a secret organisation named The Twelve and becomes the singular obsession of intelligence officer Eve Polastri, played by Sandra Oh.

Like Judith/Whiptail, Villanelle was raised in an orphanage (a key selection criterion for TV serial killers and assassins), has a dazzling wardrobe, insatiable taste for luxury (despite her humble beginnings) and complete indifference for authority figures, males in particular. Both shows pivot on the relationships between women bound by a mutual cause and a magnetic bond.

The most memorable bits of the otherwise disposable Netflix thriller Black Doves also involves female assassins who are in possession of darkly comic streaks. The plot is largely incoherent and overblown – something about a murdered Chinese ambassador and his missing daughter, nuclear armaments and deep state operatives – but it’s mostly saved by Keira Knightley’s comic-book turn as a sharpshooting spy who is married to Britain’s defence secretary.

One minute she’s hosting a posh Christmas party in her Belgravia pile and tucking the kids into bed, the next she’s wiping blood spatter off her face. And that’s before a pair of hilarious, trigger-happy lesbian mercenaries, played by Gabrielle Creevy and Ella Lily Hyland, become involved. If a spin-off isn’t in the works, it should be.

The humorous tone of both Ride or Die and Black Doves is more consistent and omnipresent than it is in The Assassin (Stan). Here Keeley Hawes plays the title role as the middle-aged woman whose sinister past has caught up with her.

She’s retired from her role as a gun-for-hire, and living on a Greek island. Then a visit from her estranged son Edward (Freddie Highmore), hoping for a rapprochement, kicks off what ultimately turns out to be a formulaic shoot-em-up thriller.

There are glimpses of black comedy as Hawes’ no-nonsense and reckless Julie reveals her deficit of maternal instincts and tries to bond with her meek and introspective son, but it’s not long before this is overshadowed by testosterone-fuelled bloodbaths and acrobatic violence sequences.

About the time the fictional Whiptail was getting her start in the killing game, in the real world the late Christopher Hitchens wrote an incendiary essay arguing that women aren’t as funny as men (remember that?). These assassins might have made him reconsider.

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