The Guide #130: Shōgun’s TV mastery
It’s been a little quiet for TV so far in 2024, hasn’t it? Sure, One Day was a treat, Mr Bates v the Post Office was significant to say the least and The Traitors was nothing short of an event – and, yes, there’s also been Mary & George, Mr & Mrs Smith, final seasons of Curb and How to With John Wilson, and Masters of the Air as well … OK, my argument is crumbling a little. Still, I do think that we’ve been missing the sort of grand, hefty drama that, from the very first frame, seems destined for the upper reaches of the end-of-year lists.
But good news: that show is here, and it’s called Shōgun (airing Tuesdays on FX in the US, and Disney+ in the UK). Four episodes in and there is a distinct vibe around this series, a feeling that it is quickly attaining that combination of mass attention and acclaim that all the major shows have. It has attracted an impressive number of eyeballs for our fractured post-streaming age, and as its storylines intensify (the end of its fourth episode has teed things up very nicely in that regard), noise around the series is only going to grow.
An adaptation of James Clavell’s hefty historical novel, Shōgun is set in the Sengoku period of feudal Japan, where a political vacuum has opened up following the death of the country’s supreme ruler, whose heir is not old enough to take to the throne. Into this febrile situation floats John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), a roguish English sailor who has been tasked by his Dutch Protestant paymasters with disrupting Portuguese Catholic merchants, who have been busy establishing trade routes with the Japanese. Blackthorne is considered a “barbarian” by the Japanese and he and his crew look unlikely to last very long in this new land (indeed, one crew member