Shōgun Teaches You How to Watch

The Japanese saga of court intrigue luxuriates in the language of taking and holding power. Photo: FX

This review was originally published on February 28, 2024. At the 2024 Emmys, Shōgun received 18 awards, including one for Outstanding Drama Series.

Shōgun immediately teaches us how to watch. A year after the death of the shōgun, who instructed five regent lords to rule in his place until his heir comes of age, Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) is summoned to Osaka. As he enters the meeting with his fellow regents, he’s instructed to sit opposite them — a new protocol indicating they now consider him a threat. “The Council of Regents appreciates your coming,” says Lord Ishido (Takehiro Hira), as if Toranaga would’ve stayed home. The ensuing discussion reveals that the other lords fear Toranaga has been accumulating power to use against them: taking six brides, expanding his fiefdom, holding hostage the mother of the shōgun-to-be, Lady Ochiba (Fumi Nikaido). This intrigue — the accusations leveled against Toranaga, the demands for retribution, the threat of punishment — is communicated in even tones without any overt displays of hostility. But one of Toranaga’s men, furious at the disrespect shown to his boss, stands to object, phrasing his protest as a polite question, then puts his hand on the hilt of his blade. No swordfight ensues; both Toranaga’s delicate situation and his man’s breach of protocol are resolved verbally. But the penalty imposed on the soldier is so horrifying I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about it.

In Shōgun, saying the wrong thing can get you killed. Saying nothing can get you killed, too. Every space has its own rules of interaction; every word and gesture must be chosen with the utmost care. The wrong choice can separate a person from their privilege, or their head from their torso. Based on the 1975 best seller by novelist James Clavell and a five-part 1980 NBC adaptation that drew 25 million viewers, the new FX miniseries, which premieres its first two episodes tonight, chronicles the power struggles among the Japanese regents and the Europeans who encroached on their once-isolated territory, transforming their economy and converting part of the Japanese population to Catholicism. The novel and original miniseries weren’t exactly “white savior” narratives — the main character, English navigator John Blackthorne, never held real power, though he served as a catalyst for plot and became valued for his advice to Lord Toranaga — but they did depict Japan mainly through a white European’s eyes.

The 2024 Shōgun, in contrast, is a Japanese saga of court intrigue and feudal politics that happens to have a few Europeans in it. The Blackthorne character, played by actor-musician Cosmo Jarvis, is once again the grain of sand whose irritations stimulate the plot, but this time, the show depicts him through the eyes of the Japanese ruling class. (They don’t like the way he smells and don’t understand why he, as a Protestant, hates Catholics; don’t both sects worship Jesus, after all?) Developed for television by the wife-and-husband team of Rachel Kondo (a short-story writer) and Justin Marks (one of the story writers for Top Gun Maverick), the FX series evokes The Godfather films and pop-historical melodramas like Elizabeth and Gladiator in its focus on the tactical aspects of taking and holding power. The series wields language like a katana, luxuriating in scenes of people talking, sometimes with a translator involved: In addition to Japanese and English, Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking characters reflect each country’s political and economic involvement in feudal Japan. But the tensest scenes unfold among the Japanese characters, who keep things as subdued as possible, even when discussing matters of life and death, until it’s time to draw swords.

Shōgun continues teaching us how to watch in the second episode. Toranaga asks Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), a Japanese noblewoman who converted to Christianity through Portuguese missionaries who taught her the language, to sit in on a conversation with Blackthorne that a Portuguese Jesuit is translating. “Oh, good!” Blackthorne tells the Jesuit. “You can twist my words in the Portuguese favor.” After the Jesuit translates a few of Blackthorne’s sentences and even gives him the Japanese word for “enemy” so he can describe England’s relationship with Portugal, the priest turns to Mariko and asks if the translations are correct. When Toranaga is assured that they are, the scene revises its visual grammar. Toranaga and Blackthorne speak their own languages to one another in closeups cut like a tennis match. Of course they can’t actually talk to each other directly all of a sudden — neither understands the other’s language. But because Mariko and the subtitles assure the viewer that the translator is spot on, we don’t need to see or hear the Jesuit’s part of the interaction anymore. We jump right into the heart of the scene, which is about Blackthorne convincing Toranaga that they can trust each other. Director Jonathan van Tulleken films the end of the conversation in direct-address close-ups with the actors looking right into the lens.

It’s not quite right to say that the series is about cultural relativism. Rather, Shōgun has more of an anthropological bent, particularly in its more extreme moments of viciousness, such as the punishment against the soldier who stood up to the regents (we only see his wife’s reaction), or one depicting a lord who likes to observe the people he condemns to death in order to understand what happens at the moment of expiration. From inside his quarters, he listens to one of Blackthorne’s men scream as he’s boiled alive with the fascinated expression of a birder trying to deduce what sort of swallow they hear singing. Yet in other scenes, he comes across as a likable guy you’d want to have a conversation with. The contrast never makes you think What an inconsistent characterization but rather People sure are complicated. There’s no superimposition of approval or disapproval on characters’ actions, an increasingly rare perspective on American television.

Shōgun actively resists the temptation to build characters worth rooting for or despising. The closest thing to a “good”-coded character is Toranaga, but it’s made clear that he’s very much a “company man,” politically speaking: more interested in protecting his family and surviving within a corrupt system than in remaking it, willing to sacrifice underlings and even their families like pawns on a chessboard if it gets him closer to his goals. Everyone else is neither hero nor villain, but a person defined by conditioning, appetites, and neuroses. Blackthorne too pulls the viewer’s sympathies this way and that: He can be an instinctively decent, even heroic person, but his default is blowhard. He radiates entitlement even when in chains, and he’s an outspoken xenophobe, just like pretty much everyone else in the story.

But Shōgun is a drama, and a big-budget commercial drama at that, so it can’t get too subtle. Whenever things seem like they’re about to slow down to the point where fickle viewers might log on to social media to complain that they don’t understand the plot, a volley of flaming arrows flutters through the air or a sliding door splatters with blood. But it’s equally impressive how often the filmmakers keep you on the edge of your seat wondering if a character will keep their mouth shut while being insulted or scapegoated into blowing their stack at the rudeness or injustice of it all, provoking a legal or physical attack that could land them in prison or at the bottom of the ocean. Do we control our drives or the other way around? That’s the question here, and Shōgun has the good taste never to answer it.

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the number of viewers of the 1980 miniseries, co-creator Rachel Kondo’s occupation, and some lines of dialogue.