Something to watch tonight: Monsieur Spade

Rooting around Kanopy the oth­er day – look­ing for some­thing free to watch that I could fea­ture in my weekly RNZ Nights seg­ment – I dis­covered that one of my favour­ite shows of the past few years had made it there¹.

Monsieur Spade is a six-part series about the great detect­ive Sam Spade – ori­gin­ally cre­ated by Dashiell Hamett and por­trayed mem­or­ably by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon – invent­ing a peace­ful retire­ment for him on a French vine­yard. Except that peace is about to be disturbed.

I liked the show very much so allow me to dir­ect your atten­tion to my ori­gin­al review from March 2025 from the old Substack ver­sion of this newsletter:

Co-created and dir­ec­ted by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit), Monsieur Spade is only six epis­odes – the per­fect length – and struc­tured to sat­is­fy. A cliff­hanger at the end of each epis­ode, a flash­back at the begin­ning, and plenty of twists, turns and double-crossing in between.

The pro­duc­tion design is excep­tion­al. Every room is full of vin­tage nick­nacks to provide lived-in details, espe­cially gramo­phones and radi­os which are giv­en lov­ing close-ups to go with the French pop of the era on the soundtrack.

And the cars, my word, the cars. So many beau­ti­ful vin­tage European auto­mo­biles, includ­ing a stun­ning 1930s auber­gine Rolls-Royce which is anoth­er thing that Spade inher­ited along with the big house and the swim­ming pool.

Does this Spade live up to Dashiel Hammett’s ori­gin­al vis­ion? Owen cer­tainly looks like he’s been in a scrap or two and has a wise­crack for every occa­sion, even if he doesn’t have the energy to always main­tain the accent. It’s a sum­mer noir – Owen’s col­lar is always open as a con­ces­sion to the heat – but occa­sion­ally we see that he has the rain­coat and fam­ous fedora still in his ward­robe, like Batman’s cape.

It’s one of my favour­ite recent reviews and I hope you like it.

---

Where to watch Monsieur Spade

Aotearoa: Streaming on Kanopy (free with a par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rary mem­ber­ship) or Rialto²

Australia: Not cur­rently available

Canada: Streaming on AMC+ or Acorn

UK & Ireland: Streaming on SkyGo or Channel 4

India: Streaming on the BBC iPlayer Amazon channel

USA: Streaming on Prime Video, Philo, AMC+ or Spectrum On Demand

---

1. At least the Upper Hutt lib­rary incarn­a­tion. ↩︎
2. The Rialto stream­ing chan­nel from Amazon. ↩︎