Acorn TV's 'Monsieur Spade' is a Thoughtful & Robust French Oddity

In 2020, some 62 million households watched The Queen’s Gambit, the Anya Taylor-Joy-led miniseries about a fictional female chess master written and directed by Scott Frank. (Frank created the show with Allan Scott but wrote and directed every episode). With such tremendous, buzzy streaming momentum under him, it’s curious that his next project – of which he’d co-write and direct every episode – would be a show about Humphrey Bogart’s character in the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade. A post-war Spade (Clive Owen) is trying to retire in provincial France but becomes entangled by intrigue and conspiracies surrounding a young girl he chaperoned to France years prior.

At absolutely no point in its six-hour season does Monsieur Spade resemble the slick, electric entertainment that hooked so many Queen’s Gambit fans, nor is it clear why someone who delivered one of Netflix’s all-time greatest hits would make this leisurely-paced, talky miniseries their follow-up. That doesn’t mean it’s a misstep – Monsieur Spade is a thoughtful and robust detective story, interested in character and real-world history, with a game French cast led by a sufficiently hardboiled and committed Owen. It’s just never quite clear why it exists, or in the form it does.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Queen’s Gambit was a huge hit but far less dense as a story than Monsieur Spade – flashiness doesn’t inherently equally great craft. Moving away from Netflix after a couple of well-received projects makes sense for Frank – AMC is not a fintech streaming service and offers more support and diligence to an experienced writer than a flailing Netflix likely would. The Queen’s Gambit probably allowed him to do something he was passionate about, and it’s a good thing that he chose to make a show that Netflix wouldn’t touch in a million years.