We know that Hollywood loves a remake. But who could have predicted that a remake of Shōgun, of all things, would end up as the best thing to be shown on television all year? Maybe in terms of numbers it made sense. After all, it was a remake of a 1980 NBC miniseries which at the time garnered the second highest viewing figures in TV history. That, in turn, was based on a book by James Clavell that had shifted millions of copies. The popularity of Shōgun was never been in doubt.
But as a thing to remake? In 2024? Yeesh. In both previous forms, Shōgun was a story about a white saviour: Englishman John Blackthorne, who travels to Japan, “civilises” some savages, teaches them how to fight properly, repeatedly saves the life of an apparently very clumsy general and then has sex with the most beautiful woman in town. Clavell’s novel also took wild liberties with historical reality, ramping up the otherness of 1600s Japan in its attitudes to violence, sex and death. You don’t need to be told that none of this would have played well in today’s landscape.
That 2024’s Shōgun managed to sidestep all these misgivings so deftly is just one of the reasons why it stands above the rest of this year’s television. If nothing else, the decision to cast actors who speak in Japanese, with subtitles, was transformative. In 1980, this wasn’t the case – the characters were left unsubtitled, siloing their personalities and motivations so that we could concentrate more on the white guy – so being able to understand the entire cast was already a huge step up. And there were a lot of subtitles, too. The fact that FX was confident in its audience’s ability to spend much of each episode reading speaks volumes about its approach to reworking the source material.
There was also renewed interest in preserving some form of historical accuracy. When 1980’s Shōgun was shown in Japan, its crude approach made it immediately unpopular. But as soon as the current series was announced, producer and lead actor Hiroyuki Sanada went to great lengths to ensure that authenticity would be the watchword here, and sets, costumes and scripts were assembled under the watchful eyes of Japanese consultants.
To say that the effort paid off would be an enormous understatement, and it transformed Shōgun into a tense and beautiful game of chess. This time the focus was on Sanada’s Lord Toranaga, a strategist waiting in the shadows for an opportunity to definitively seize power from his enemies. The feints and machinations of his plans take up the bulk of the story, leaving Blackthorne to become something of a comic figure.
And that he was. For the most part, Cosmo Jarvis played Blackthorne with a hilariously empty bluster, as someone who was born with power and couldn’t yet understand that it had been taken from him. His delivery, at times reminiscent of Tom Hardy at his most unhinged, helped give this very serious show a lightness that the previous version wasn’t quite able to hit.
I suspect audiences realised Shōgun was a masterpiece at roughly the same time: during the penultimate episode, Crimson Sky. All throughout the series, Toranaga had mentioned “Crimson Sky” as his endgame, the moment when his plotting would come together. The assumption was that this would take the form of an all-out attack on his enemies, a visual spectacular to rival anything on Game of Thrones. The moment that we realised it was not going to be that – it would be something smaller and infinitely more heartbreaking – has to go down as one of the greatest seen on television this century. Speaking personally, it was also the moment I realised I’d been holding my breath for what felt like five minutes.
You could say the same for the finale, which swerved the expected violent climax to give us something more vague and poetic. It was a sign that Shōgun had the guts to confound every expectation going. What a show this was.
And yet it already feels like an artefact. Shōgun was commissioned in 2018, when expensive prestige television was still something people made. The fact that a second season is now in production – even though the story has already been told perfectly from start to finish – is a sign that studios favour the fat returns of a proven hit over fundamental artistry. But let’s worry about that when we need to. Shōgun has made stars of its cast. In showrunners Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, it has given us a pair of all-timers. The 10 episodes shown this year were just about as perfect as television gets. If nothing else, we still have that.