Sam Spade’s wine-sipping detour concludes

Sam Spade’s French adventure is ending now. Zombies are ready to take his timeslot.
First, the story needs to be resolved – or, in this case, semi-resolved. The “Monsieur Spade” (shown here) finale is 9 p.m. Sunday (Feb. 18) on AMC.
Viewers can also catch the full, six-episode experience on the Acorn or AMC+ streaming services. They’ll find an Americana classic – the tough, terse-talking private eye – transferred to an opposite world.
“I just thought it was as far away from Sam Spade as possibly could be: Having a vineyard, even drinkng wine at all,” producer-director Scott Frank told the Television Critics Association.
Spade was at the core of “The Maltese Falcon” – the 1930 Dashiell Hammett novel and the 1941 movie, which the American Film Institute puts at No. 31 on its all-time list. We expect to see him around whiskey, not wine and in the American shadows, not the sunny French countryside.
So the idea was hatched: After the war, Spade met a French landowner. She died; he inherited her estate and lived quietly … until his old life found him.
Frank is also a talented writer, with Oscar nominations for “Logan” and “Out of Sight” and an Emmy nomination for “The Queen’s Gambit.” This time, however, he got Tom Fontana (“Homicide,” “Oz”) to do the writing, Without much exaggeration, AMC chief Dan McDermott calls them “two towering giants in the storytelling universe.”
They were ready for anything, Fontana said. “When I said to Scott, ‘Let’s kill all the nuns,’ he embraced it. very totally.”
That’s not Fontana’s usual mode. His sister is a nun, the model for Rita Moreno’s character in “Oz..” But in “Monsieur Spade,” everything is upended.
What stays consistent is Spade’s knack for quick shards of dialog. We might think of this guy as “very laconic and very cool,” said Clive Owen, who plays him. But “he’s actually super-quick with his dialogue. Very, very nimble.”
The world around him gets more perplexing. By last week’s episode (airing, alas, against the Super Bowl), it was a thick tangle. And now …
Well, people sometimes talk about “deus ex machina,” the Greek-theater custom of having a god suddenly swoop down to resolve things. Now imagine that this sorta-god is played by Alfre Woodard and says she’s Canadian and probably isn’t and we’re never quite sure what happened but we know it was interesting.
Then, abruptly, “Monsieur Spade” is over. Next week, the zombies (via the new “The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live”) take back the timeslot.