Over the weekend, I discovered myself hesitant to press play on Shōgun, FX’s recent hit show adapted from James Clavell’s bestselling novel. That’s not because I used to be suspicious of the rapturous early critical response to the limited series or because I didn’t trust the creators to regulate a few of the Orientalist motifs present within the source material. No, my reluctance was rather more primitive: I simply didn’t wish to endure what would almost definitely be an agonizing dirge of exposition.
That trial seemed mainly unavoidable. Clavell’s book, which became a real sensation when it was published in 1975, explores not one but two arcane battlegrounds of history across its 1,100 pages, with the crux of the drama playing out across each the terminus of Japan’s warring states period and the European wars of faith. Functionally, that meant that Shōgun’s pilot would want to distill a whole bunch of tiresome minutiae: the colonial assets of each Protestant and Catholic dominions, Japanese military decorum, the nice lines of distinction between the empire and the shogunate, and so forth. All that throat-clearing doesn’t typically add up to forcing television.
And yet, throughout the first few moments of its premiere, Shōgun reveals itself to be miraculously unburdened by all of that shit. The show disposes of the entire tedious table-setting and drills deep into the plotty heart of the matter, proudly embracing the titillating thrills the common viewer is chasing once they determine to tune in to a historical epic called Shōgun. The series is freed from the entire extracurricular homework that has turn out to be so central to the trendy entertainment apparatus; blessedly, you won’t have to take heed to any podcasts or skulk in any forums so as to procure a basic semblance of who’s who. Nor will Shōgun humiliate your gaps of information, forcing you to succeed in for the pause button so you’ll be able to futilely scan the Wikipedia page for “Sengoku period” in hopes of catching up with the script. I’m not exaggerating after I say that this quality makes Shōgun the most effective show currently on television. It’s rollicking, violent, transcendently silly, often incisive, and most significantly, totally legible—a rare enough feat that it bears highlighting.
Shōgun does provide some basic epochal scaffolding for the audience, to begin out with. A couple of lines of text set the stage within the opening scene: The yr is 1600, Japan is the crown jewel of the Portuguese monarchy’s global trading empire, and a fleet of roving anglophone Protestants is in the hunt for the island in order that it could pillage it. Typically, a studio would use this premise to introduce a whole lot of various characters, each carrying their very own complex interiority and motivation, so as to flesh out the epic scope of Japanese feudal society. While a great show could be forged with that formula, Shōgun as a substitute, mercifully, asks us to fret about exactly two men on this humongous world. We have the foulmouthed, Aragorn-ish English mercenary John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) and Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), a seasoned general who, at odds together with his political rivals, is set to turn out to be the titular shōgun by the series’ end.
The animating principles of those two are telegraphed to the audience with refreshingly remedial deliberateness. Jarvis, as Blackthorne, practically spits out his historically annotative contempt for Catholics, the greater East, and his captors once he washes ashore on Japan—a genuinely adroit method to slip in vital exposition. Meanwhile, Sanada’s Toranaga is pure, uncut trope: a reluctant hero taking quiet walks within the rock gardens of Osaka, soliloquizing concerning the nature of duty. The ancillary characters are painted with even less room for scholarly interpretation. We know that Blackthorne’s captor, Kashigi Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano), is evil because he literally boils considered one of his prisoners alive in a gigantic stone pot, afterward remarking that he is upset by the shortage of vibrancy in the unfortunate man’s tormented death rattle. This is to not say that these characters are thinly written, a lot as you’ll know exactly where you stand with them from the jump—which, speaking as a viewer fatigued by television’s deluge of thick story-bible dockets, ponderous moral ambiguity, and gestures to Spartan art-house prestige (taking a look at you, Barry), that is an incredible relief.
Shōgun’s closest thematic analog could be Game of Thrones, within the sense that each shows feature a forged of charismatic but selfish, sadistic, and emotionally stunted characters who’re all ultimately out for their very own gain. The two series also share imaginative ultra-violence, candlelit medieval subterfuge, and the occasional grim sex scene deployed for example some form of bad-feeling power dynamic. The difference is that Game of Thrones was regularly blemished by anemic midseason episodes wherein everyone sits around a picket table in King’s Landing to arbitrate minor bureaucratic procedures. Seriously, what the fuck is Cersei talking about? (The same problem plagued the Amazon series Rings of Power, which seemed to be made for probably the most dogmatic and annoying Silmarillion-heads, but I digress.)
Shōgun, however, lets nothing stand in the trail of its relentless momentum. All of the executive overhead is handled instantaneously—the sets are brightly lit and awash in each literal and narrative clarity, murky mythos, shadowy motifs, and overpromising foreshadowing be damned. Why can Blackthorne communicate with the Japanese regents? Because he can speak a little little bit of Portuguese, and so do the translators. How will we know that considered one of Toranaga’s subjects committed a social faux pas? Because the disgraced samurai threatens to commit seppuku on the spot. I even have been trained to feel clueless after I watch television—to order my final learned opinion until after I’ve consumed several lengthy Reddit threads—but Shōgun humbles itself with lucidity and, in doing so, reaches a recent type of sublime.
That, I swear to you, explains why Shōgun has earned such an enthralled response from viewers, who gave FX its biggest Hulu premiere ever. The series currently sits at a 99 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with most critics waxing poetic about its sumptuous visuals, historical precision, and fiery interplay between cultures and languages. All of those worldly attributes could be true, but allow us to not be too boastful to overlook the show’s primary appeal: We love Shōgun because we all know what’s happening, and albeit, that shouldn’t be nearly as rare because it is.
Credit : slate.com
