In 2023, Spinners did something no African television series had done before: it entered the main competition at Canneseries, the international festival dedicated to prestige television, where it competed alongside productions from HBO, Hulu, and the world’s most capitalised streaming platforms. It did not enter as a novelty. It entered as a serious competitor — and then won the Best Foreign TV Series award at the Shanghai International TV Festival’s Magnolia Awards, beating Succession. That sentence still needs reading twice. A South African series about township spinning culture, made in Cape Town in English and Kaaps and Afrikaans, beat Succession at a major international television prize.
Filming has now wrapped on Spinners Season 2. StudioCanal has announced the return of Spinners for Season 2, to premiere in 2026 on both Canal+ and MultiChoice’s Showmax and DStv platforms. The eight-part Canal+ Original, co-produced with Showmax, is once again directed by Jaco Bouwer, whose credits include the SXSW prizewinning eco-horror film Gaia. Benjamin Hoffman returns as showrunner and co-creator alongside producer Joachim Landau of Federation Middle East, Africa and Caribbean. SAFTA winners Matthew Jankes and Sean Steinberg are back as head writers. Locarno, Amiens, and FESPACO winner Ramadan Suleman co-produces through Natives at Large, his South African full-service production company.
The new season’s premise: two years after escaping the violent grip of gang life, Ethan and his friends have become spinning stars in the big city. Fame, love and happiness finally seem within reach — until a brutal ambush, orchestrated by Ethan’s old gang, shatters their peace. Desperate, Ethan turns to the Maseko clan for help, but their protection comes at a heavy cost.
Award-winning actor Cantona James and Chelsea Thomas reprise their leading roles. Joining them is SAFTA winner Clementine Mosimane as the matriarch of the Maseko crime family; Mondli Makhoba as her bodyguard; and rising stars Luyanda Zwane and Aphiwe Mkefe as the matriarch’s children. Real-life top female spinner Kayla Oliphant — recently featured in the National Geographic series David Blaine: Do Not Attempt — appears in a cameo and doubles for Thomas as her stunt double.
The Platform Irony
Here is the context that every piece of coverage on this Season 2 announcement has either ignored or mentioned briefly before moving on: Showmax, the platform that co-produced Spinners and gave it the creative conditions in which it could be made, closed on April 1, 2026. The platform that allowed South African producers to make boundary-pushing work — the platform that, as one producer told Variety, made them feel like “a little renaissance in content freedom, content creativity and opportunities to open up the industry” — is gone.
Just as a panel at the 8th Joburg Film Festival was about to take the stage, the cast and producers of Spinners were in the room alongside Canal+’s Laurent Sicouri — head of cinema and series for Canal+ International — to tout the upcoming second season, when Variety broke the news about the axe coming down on Showmax. The series that represents the best of what Showmax enabled is launching in the year Showmax ended. That is not a small irony. It is the central tension of what African premium television is navigating right now.
Canal+’s Two Global Franchises
Spinners has been chosen as one of two golden goose franchises Canal+ Africa wants to sell to streaming platforms globally, the other being Shaka iLembe. Canal+ aims to consolidate its production of Canal+ Original TV series in Africa at eight series per year from all over the continent, to be distributed worldwide.
That target — eight per year, pan-continental — is the commissioning ambition the industry needs to hold Canal+ to. Since 2018 the company has produced 35 African originals across 11 countries. These include Agent (South Africa), Cacao (Côte d’Ivoire), Ekwi (Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire), Ewusu (Cameroon), Invisibles (Côte d’Ivoire), Lakantane (Senegal), Niabla (Côte d’Ivoire), Or Blanc (Côte d’Ivoire), and Mami Wata (Gabon). Eight per year represents a significant acceleration. The question is what creative conditions those eight series will be made under now that Showmax’s relative editorial independence has been absorbed back into Canal+’s institutional structure.
Spinners Season 2 will answer that question in the watching.
Spinners Season 2 · Eight episodes · Dir. Jaco Bouwer · Canal+ / DStv · 2026. Sources: Variety (October 2025), News24 (October 2025), StudioCanal announcement, Sinema Focus, Htxt. — Lerato Dlamini. RollCallAfrica, May 2026.
