James Clavell’s “Shōgun” is a notoriously long book. The first edition in 1975 ran well over a thousand pages and yet was somehow still a truly massive, culture-shifting literary hit, selling millions of copies. Not only did it start a successful series of books for the author known as The Asian Saga, but it really helped define the prestige network TV mini-series. In 1980, a nine-hour mini-series captivated viewers on NBC over five nights, becoming the highest-rated program in the history of the network and second only to ABC’s “Roots” on any network. Starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune, “Shōgun” was a cultural phenomenon in a way that’s not really possible in 2024.
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But FX is willing to try to resurrect this legendary tale in its own 10-episode mini-series, a lavish, expensive affair that feels as inspired by “Game Of Thrones” as it does the Clavell original. FX’s attempt at prestige period action has moments in which it bursts to life and undeniable ambition that holds it together. There are times early on when the wring sags into a show that’s a bit too talky and loaded with characters that it’s impossible to care about, but then a composition or creative storytelling choice will spring this TV samurai back to life just enough that viewer patience will be rewarded. The truth is that “Shōgun” doesn’t feel like many other epic TV because it’s simply better made than most of the competition. It takes some time to get used to that fact.
“In 1600, an Englishman went to Japan and became a samurai.” These are reportedly the words that Clavell read in his daughter’s textbook that inspired him to write “Shōgun.” The story is loosely based on the real 17th-century navigator William Adams, here reconfigured as John Blackthorne (an excellent Cosmo Jarvis), an English sailor who is introduced in what he thinks is his final days. He has sailed around the world, and most of the ships that sailed with him have sunk. His captain is planning to take his own life before succumbing to hunger, but Blackthorne is adamant that land is just across the foggy horizon. Of course, he’s right, shipwrecking on the coast of Japan. The scene in the premiere in which his ship emerges from the fog to a stunned villager, like something out of a horror movie, is one of the episode’s best.
In fact, the greatest strength of this adaptation by creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks are those well-composed visuals. It’s a show with remarkable cinematic language from an old-fashioned cinematic epic feature film. Sweeping shots of landscapes set to a luscious score would make someone who stumbled upon this production presume it’s a high-budget feature production. It has the massive scope of something like “Napoleon” or other Oscar bait-y period epics, but the most remarkable thing about it may be how often it feels like it justifies that scope, unlike so many other recent shows like it. There have been a lot of recent high-priced shows like “The Rings of Power” or “The Wheel of Time” that felt like they reached for self-importance, but “Shōgun” finds it through artistry and character instead of just signaling how much it matters.
Blackthorne lands in Japan in a time of great upheaval. There is no clear leader, and five regents run the land. One such regent, Lord Yoshii Toranaga (a great Hiroyuki Sanada), has become the enemy of the other four, realizing that he may have to go to war to stay alive. Before that can even happen, Blackthorne must navigate the region’s religious landscape. With echoes of Martin Scorsese’s stunning “Silence,” the first few episodes detail the Portuguese influence on the land, seeking to bring Catholicism to Japan, in stark contrast to Blackthorne’s Protestantism, which makes him an ally of the skeptical Japanese.
Jarvis plays Blackthorne as a brilliant improviser, someone whose instincts allow him to find his purpose in any dynamic. At first, he’s little more than a bargaining chip really, moved around the land as a potential strategist in the coming battle. He becomes quickly aligned with Toka Mariko (Anna Sawai), who serves as Blackthorne’s translator. As played by Sawai, she is a brutal realist, someone who also understands what needs to be done to save herself and those she serves. Blackthorne, Toranaga, and Mariko may be very different people, but Marks and Kondo portray their common brilliance as people who know that their instincts are what will allow them to survive.
The 1980 version notoriously didn’t translate the Japanese spoken by actors like Mifune in an effort to keep us locked into Blackthorne’s POV. It created more of a white savior narrative than Clavell’s book intended, and the FX version wisely discards that aspect, delivering more of its storytelling subtitled than not. It helps balance the playing field between Blackthorne and the Japanese characters. However, the show does dip a bit when the central trio are not on-screen, digging into other characters in this pending battle in a way that feels designed to broaden the canvas of the story but sometimes pulls focus from what works best.
It’s a complaint that falls away as one gets more accustomed to the TV language of “Shōgun.” Yes, it’s talky. Yes, it takes itself very seriously. But it justifies that scope and that pretentiousness with imagery that feels resonant and characters that feel grounded. It’s impossible for anything to have the same seismic impact as the 1980 version in 2024, but that doesn’t mean that other TV creators couldn’t look to “Shōgun” as a guide for how to do this kind of thing well. [B+]