4 out of 5

Created by: Scott Frank and Tom Fowler

covers season 1

At the time of Monsieur Spade’s release in 2024, we were at least a few years past the spike in the media trend of long-running franchise’s or IP’s characters being projected into their later years – e.g. the “wow, we’re old now” takes on James Bond, or John McClane. While Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Slade no longer has the social cachet of those characters, the likely audience for Monsieur Spade – skewing at least to a demo that knows the reference without a google assist – the introduction to Clive Owen’s Sam Spade, shown between an initial trip to France in 1955 and the series’ present day of 1963, gives us the tell-tale “we’re old now” cues of a stooped posture, a shuffling walk, and a cough that aligns with Spade being told he has the beginning stages of emphysema; in other words: we get it. And unlike Bond or McClane, there’s not really a hook to the Spade character that tells us why this setup should matter – he’s a tough-talking P.I., and now he’s older, okay – except for a forlorn look that immediately explained by Spade’s loss of his wife between those flash-backed and present years, and a quote up front that suggests that creators / writers Scott Frank and Tom Fontana were just straight up amused by dropping the character into foreign lands, and making it a retirement of sorts was the justification.

In other other words, the general framing for the show doesn’t feel like it inherently matters – as in, “why does this have to be Sam Spade?” – and if you read any discourse on the show, you may also be aware that the first season’s conclusion was fairly contentious.

There are aspects of those questions / observations I don’t disagree with, but there’s a more important throughline that Frank and Fontana are playing with: subversion. Monsieur Spade is fantastic at this, doubling down on a lot of noir tropes of femme fatales and red herrings to double down on subverting the same. Sam’s age does matter, when he can’t quite chase down a baddie due to his smoker’s cough, but it also doesn’t matter, as he’s still stuffed to the gills with perfect quips and observes everything in a moment; the central mystery – of a kidnapped boy, and the Why of that kidnapping – is important, but as more and more ridiculous people get wrapped up in that mystery, it also isn’t, which is where that troubling confusion comes into play. Just as we’re wondering why this has to be Sam Spade, the show is pretty much telling us exactly that: it doesn’t have to be. The lingering familiarity is false anyway: some name nods to the movie / book aside, when was the last time you watched or read The Maltese Falcoln? And if it was yesterday, doesn’t this satisfy most of the requirements for a sequel? Aren’t those nods and quips what we would want, maintaining the play-like patter of noir, visualizing it in the shadow-soaked streets of 60s France? Is it so bad that Spade would prefer to put the hat and gun away and be sun-soaked instead – and isn’t it then satisfying that his past renown as a PI is what draws him back in?

This plays on top of the show dipping in and out of being both a think piece on aging and motivation and a solid mystery. The kidnapped boy is, essentially, the mystical Maltese Falcon MacGuffin here, and I credit Frank and Fontana (with Frank directing) with giving us pretty much all of the clues to at least suss out the players, with the show’s themes suggestive of the mystery’s rhyme and reason. There’s definitely some disconnect with the way things start out incredibly violent (not on screen, but in terms of what occurs) and then peter off into something that feels more harmless, and the show is also a few degrees overstuffed with side character backstory. Additionally, Cara Bossom’s performance as Theresa – Spade’s young charge who initially brought him to France, trying to deliver her as a youngster to her father – is phenomenal, on par with Owen’s magnificent representation of a whip-smart curmudgeon who carefully deploys his apparently poorly-accented French – but there’s one or two moments that sexualize the character somewhat and I’m not clear on the intention of those scenes. More “favorably” it could be read as being “true” to the pulp genre, as gross as that sounds, but I used a lot of quotes just to get there. It’s nothing too overt – a passing comment; a lingering camera – still, within the context of the show I wholly don’t think it was necessary.

And those are words on Monsieur Spade, the Sam Spade sequel that isn’t a sequel; the noir mystery that might just be a drama about getting older in France. Pacing wise, this is definitely more akin to UK slow-boil mysteries, but the DNA of pulp is still there, and I frankly don’t think I’ve ever heard such a consistent collection of funny retorts as offered by Owen’s Spade across all six episodes; worth the experience just to come away with some choice quotes, then stay for a solid, clever character story.