With Historic Canneseries Selection ‘Spinners,’ South Africa’s Showmax Revs Up Push for Pole Position in African Streaming Race
Set to make history as the first African show to take part in Canneseries’ main competition, South African extreme sports action drama “Spinners” offers a gripping portrait of life in Cape Town’s hardscrabble Southside — and the latest sign of a growing push for shows from the Global South in the international TV industry.
The series follows 17-year-old Ethan (Cantona James), who’s looking for a way out of the Southside’s bloody cycle of gang violence through spinning, a South African extreme motorsport that features drivers performing daredevil stunts — such as leaning out of windows or standing on the roof — while driving at high speeds.
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Part gangster series, part coming-of-age sports drama, “Spinners” is produced by Joachim Landau and Raphaël Rocher at Federation Studios’ Empreinte Digitale, and co-created by Landau and Benjamin Hoffman. The show is a co-production of South African streaming service Showmax and Vivendi’s Canal+ alongside Ramadan Suleman and his Johannesburg-based Natives at Large.
The series is directed by Jaco Bouwer, whose eco-horror “Gaia” won the Zeiss cinematography award at SXSW in 2021. Drawing inspiration from gritty crime dramas such as “The Wire” and “Top Boy,” Bouwer said the show is an attempt to move beyond “stereotypical gangster narratives” pulled from Cape Town’s notorious badlands to tell “a story with heart, set amidst great social and political adversity.”
“It is always a challenge to portray an antagonist in a sympathetic light, and it was important to me for the audience to truly empathize with him, as well as the hero of our story,” he said. “These are not intrinsically bad people, but people forced to make difficult decisions under impossible circumstances.”
Yolisa Phahle, CEO of Showmax and connected video at the streamer’s parent company, MultiChoice, said the show highlights everything the service is looking to bring to customers on its platform. “It’s about more local languages. It’s about diverse stories. It’s about being hyper-local,” said Phahle. “‘Spinners’ ticks all those boxes.”
Backed by Canal+ and Federation, the eight-part action drama series is the latest example of an international TV industry setting its sights beyond traditional production heavyweights, such as France and Spain, and increasingly toward the Global South. Witness the Iranian drama “The Actor” walking off with the top prize at this year’s Series Mania, winning a competition that also featured a first appearance from the tiny West African nation of Benin (“Black Santiago Club”).
All but absent from international showcases such as Series Mania and Canneseries in recent years, South African TV creators are now regularly stamping their passports for Europe’s most prestigious fests. Along with the historic first for “Spinners” in Cannes, the crime series “Donkerbos” was chosen for Berlinale Series Market Selects at this year’s EFM, a year after the quirky murder mystery “Recipes for Love and Murder” bowed in Berlin.
While global streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have ramped up their investment across the continent, Phahle said it’s the homegrown Showmax that’s in pole position. “We are an African business. We are a company that’s born out of MultiChoice, which has over 30 years’ experience in our markets,” she said. “We’re trying to democratize SVOD. We are making a bespoke service for the people of sub-Saharan Africa.”
Owned by pan-African pay-TV operator MultiChoice and operating in all 50 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Showmax has doubled down on local content across key African markets. Among its slate of upcoming projects are the streamer’s first animated series, “Jay Jay: The Chosen One,” about Nigerian soccer legend Augustine “Jay Jay” Okocha; “Second Family,” its first original telenovela in Kenya; and “The Billionaire’s Wife,” Showmax’s second original scripted drama series from Ghana. The streamer is also producing a 200-episode Nigerian adaptation of “The River,” the International Emmy-nominated South African telenovela, its first long-running episodic drama in the West African nation.
Key to Showmax’s growth are partnerships with global-facing companies that share its ambitions both on the continent and beyond, such as Fremantle (“Reyka”) and Germany’s Night Train Media (“Catch Me a Killer”). “Spinners,” meanwhile, marks the second collaboration with Canal+ after the two companies partnered last year on the epic fantasy drama series “Blood Psalms,” from creators Layla Swart and Jahmil X.T. Qubeka (“Of Good Report”), described as an African “Game of Thrones” and billed as Showmax’s “biggest and most ambitious series” to date.
For Phahle, the upside of such partnerships is clear. “We’re able to bring a production of incredible quality because of our partnership with Canal+,” Phahle said of “Spinners.” “It’s our commitment to enthrall audiences. Working with Canal+, combining our financial resources, means we can make this kind of show.”
While local content “is the big acquisition driver in all of our markets,” according to Phahle, the Showmax exec acknowledged that offering a variety of premium international content is the key to convincing subscribers to stay.
To that end, MultiChoice signed a deal last month with NBCUniversal and the U.K.’s Sky, announcing a forthcoming relaunch of the streaming service using Peacock technology. Along with content from NBCUniversal and Sky, the revamped Showmax will carry third-party content from HBO, Warner Bros. Discovery and Sony, among others, as well as live English Premier League football and programming from M-Net’s linear pay-TV channels alongside Showmax’s slate of African Originals. The launch date and pricing of the new platform is yet to be announced.
“With NBCUniversal as our partner, we have a guaranteed supply of really strong international programming. For us, it really shores up our content supply and it means that we really can offer people the biggest variety and the best content in the world, and the best content in Africa,” said Phahle.
“We need to be able to bring the biggest shows from all over the world to Showmax to make sure that our content slate is the strongest content slate our audiences can ever hope to find. Once people are in, they just want to watch great content and they want a variety. When you’re paying for a service, you really do want a connection with the broader world,” she added. “We’re trying to be something for everybody.”
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