When Showmax announced its Canneseries selection in 2023, the moment was genuinely historic. Spinners — a South African series about the underground motorsport of street spinning, its culture, its danger, its community — became the first African series ever to be selected in competition at the international festival dedicated to television. Canneseries, which brings together the prestige television of Europe and increasingly the world for annual competition in Cannes, had found Africa. For the first time, an African series sat in the same competition as productions from HBO, from Canal+, from the BBC, from streaming platforms that spend more on a single series than most African broadcasters spend in a year.
That moment happened on Showmax. Showmax is now dead.
Season 2 of Spinners is confirmed for 2026 on Canal+ and MultiChoice’s DStv platforms. The series continues. The cast — including Cantona James and Chelsea Thomas, Dillon Windvogel and Brendon Daniels — returns. The story of the spinners of Cape Town continues on screen.
What has not continued is the institutional environment that produced it.
What Showmax Was, Actually
Before its 2023 relaunch with NBCUniversal’s Peacock technology and $309 million in combined equity funding, Showmax was primarily understood as DStv’s streaming arm. After the relaunch, it briefly became something more interesting: a commissioning platform willing to back African content with genuine formal ambition, at budgets that allowed the production values that international prestige television requires, for subjects that traditional African broadcasters had historically treated as too risky or too niche.
The list of series that Showmax commissioned and would not exist without it — Catch Me a Killer, Dam, Adulting, Khaki Fever, Youngins, Outlaws — represents a specific editorial position that was held consistently for several years. That editorial position said: African audiences will pay for ambitious, well-made, formally confident television about their own lives, their own communities, their own history. Spinners was the international apex of that position. Its Canneseries selection proved that the position was commercially and artistically correct.
Canal+ closed Showmax on April 1, 2026. Content is migrating to DStv Stream. The commissioning operation is over.
The Institutional Void
What replaces Showmax’s editorial position in the African television landscape is a question with no clear answer at this moment.
Netflix commissions from Nigeria and South Africa at a scale that does not match what Showmax was doing. Netflix’s commissioning brief runs toward commercially proven genres — thriller, reality, drama with established talent attachment — rather than toward the formally adventurous, subject-matter-driven programming that defined Showmax’s best work. Netflix is not a replacement.
Canal+ has stated it will continue investing in local content across its African operations. Its 2026 showcase revealed productions including the Spinners Season 2 commitment and contributions to Shaka iLembe’s final season. But Canal+’s content investment is organised around its subscriber acquisition and retention needs across 25 African countries, and its commissioning apparatus is more conservative than Showmax’s at its peak. Canal+ commissions what it knows will perform. Showmax, at its best, commissioned what it believed in.
That distinction is the difference between an industry that grows and an industry that maintains.
Spinners Season 2 and What It Carries
Season 2 of Spinners exists because the production was already in development when the Showmax decision was made. The cast and crew are committed. The story continues. This is good. The series that put African television on the Canneseries map deserves a second season, and the creative team behind it deserves the opportunity to build on what they established.
What Season 2 cannot do, by itself, is replace the institutional conditions that made Season 1 possible. It can continue a story. It cannot recreate the editorial environment in which the next Spinners — the next formally ambitious, culturally specific, internationally significant African series — gets commissioned and developed and broadcast.
That environment, right now, does not have a clear institutional home.
The industry needs to name that gap openly and begin the work of filling it. Whether through African-owned streaming platforms — the Kava and Circuits TV experiments that are early and unstable but necessary — through African broadcaster consortia, or through new co-production structures between African creative industries and international financiers who can commit to the multi-year patience that prestige television requires.
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Spinners at Canneseries told the world what African television could be. The world heard. Now the question is whether the African industry can build the infrastructure to say it again, consistently, and not have to wait for a foreign platform to decide the conditions are right.
Spinners Season 2 arrives on Canal+ and DStv in 2026. Production by Gambit Films.
— Kwame Asante covers African television and the international screen industry from Accra.
