Netflix announced on Thursday that Matt Rife: Lucid – A Crowd Work Special, its second special from comedian Matt Rife, is set to premiere globally on the service on August 13.
Marking Netflix’s first one-hour crowd work special, Rife’s new hour is one of two coming up, under a deal with the streamer on which we were first to report. It comes following the November release of Matt Rife: Natural Selection, the comic’s third special, which was the most viewed on Netflix for the second half of 2023, garnering over 10.3 million views in its first two weeks and earning a Top 10 ranking in 42 countries including #1 in the U.S., Canada, and South Africa.
Filmed at The Comedy Zone in Charlotte, North Carolina, Lucid is directed by Rife’s longtime friend Erik Griffin. Rife exec produced alongside his manager Christina Shams, as well as Daniel Powell and Alex Bach for Irony Point, which served as the production company.
Currently, Rife is on the road for his “ProbleMATTic World Tour,” one of the largest in over 20 years, for which he last year sold around 600,000 tickets over the span of just 48 hours. Highlights from the Live Nation tour have included four sold-out shows at The Dolby Theater in Hollywood, a record five consecutive sold-out performances at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut, and the sale of over 17,000 tickets at the Hollywood Bowl, as Rife became the youngest stand-up comic to sell out the venue during Netflix Is a Joke Fest.
Blowing up last year on TikTok and seeing his career hit the stratosphere almost overnight, Rife has amassed over 35.6 million followers and over 2.5 billion views globally on social media. From a small town near Columbus, Ohio, he started performing at the age of 15 and moved to Los Angeles two years later in pursuit of a career in Hollywood. Self-financing his first one-hour special, Only Fans, and releasing it on YouTube in 2021, he again bet on himself two years later as he took the same approach with his follow-up, Matthew Steven Rife, before making his way to Netflix. Previously, he also released the crowd work special Walking Red Flag on YouTube, seeing it amass over 13 million views.
Rife made his television debut on MTV’s Wild ‘N Out as the youngest cast member in history for four seasons before moving on to other MTV properties, such as hosting the reboot of TRL and appearing on The Challenge. Other credits include Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Fresh Off the Boat, BET’s North of the 10, NBC’s comedy competition show Bring the Funny and Netflix’s That ’90s Show. Additionally, he’s currently in development on a workplace comedy set in a gym, which he’ll write and star in for Netflix.
