Spinners

Creators: Benjamin Hoffman and Joachim Landau

Director: Jaco Bouwer

South Africa series Spinners arrives on Studiocanal this week, an eight-part examination of life in criminal gangs and the opportunity given to teenage driver Ethan to escape from that world through the sport ‘Spinning’. Benjamin Hoffman and Joachim Landau’s series blends two very different experiences, the intensity of violence and its consequences with the sports movie trajectory for Ethan who builds a team from scratch with his new friends and seeks a monetary prize that will help him find a new life out of the gang’s reach. Slightly drawn out, Spinners does some things we have seen before but like Days of Thunder and Ford vs Ferrari before it, makes the cars look exhilarating.

Abandoned by their addict mother, Ethan takes care of little brother Byron and while a respected member of his little community in Cape Town, his real business is helping gang lord Damien who helped Ethan when his mother left. Stuck in a cycle of violence, Ethan rejects his association when a rival gang run by brothers results in a personal tragedy and an escalation of warfare. Meanwhile, Ethan meets Shane and a group of spinners that opens the door to a new life.

Based on the first three episodes, there is a lot of content in Spinners as Hoffman and Landau introduce several narrative strands following Ethan but also Damine, Kayla (Ethan’s mother), detectives investigating the gang and other members of the broader community. The first episode perhaps overplays its hand with a big shoot out and car chase that seems to back the show into a corner, but the second and third episodes start to fill out some of the backstory and outcomes of their actions.

The violence, though shocking, is rather formulaic, attempting to push the boundaries of cruelty, yet even across the first few episodes you get the picture very quickly and this part of the story, even the attempt to humanise the baddies who have families of their own, is least engaging and most overfamiliar. Ethan’s trajectory and the role of the two detectives trying to pin together murders and drug crime with the abusive behaviours of violent men is much more interesting, looking at the broader social and cultural impact of gang violence for those on the periphery, and for Ethan the coming-of-age excitement of finding a new way ahead, one that has the highs and lows of sports, young love and building a respectable life from difficult beginnings.

Morally, much of this doesn’t bode well for Cantona James’ Ethan who may yet have to atone even for the petty misdemeanours he commits to fund his exit from the gang, and its hard to see how eight 53-minute episodes will develop. But the story does get more compelling as audiences invest in Ethan’s development and who knows what the consequences of his actions may be for everyone he knows.

Spinnersmakes its UK debut exclusively on STUDIOCANAL Presents1st October.