Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo’s Shogun is the hottest new show on Hulu. The miniseries built hype with a solid, straightforward marketing campaign based around its celebrated star. The series earned a stunning 100% positive rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Only two of the ten episodes have hit Disney+, Hulu, and FX currently, but it’s already an event. Anyone currently sleeping on Shogun needs to leap into the sweeping epic as soon as possible.
Shogun Claimed Its Rightful Place Atop Hulu’s Top Ten
Shogun is the second adaptation of James Clavell’s classic 1975 novel of the same name. The book became a television sensation in 1980 when an Emmy Award-winning miniseries brought Clavell’s words to life. Shogun tells the story of John Blackthorne and Lord Yoshii Toranaga. The events are fictionalized dramatizations of the story of William Adams, the English sailor who became a Western samurai under Tokugawa Ieyasu. Paramount’s 1980 adaptation is an unquestioned classic featuring legendary performer Toshiro Mifune in the title role. Similarly, FX and Hulu’s Shogun features widely beloved star Hiroyuki Sanada as Lord Toranaga. Sanada drives the series, flipping the script of the book and the 80s adaptation. At last, Shogun is about the character whose rank provides the title, instead of the white guy who stumbles into his court. This brilliant reworking revitalized a classic story and elevated it to excellence.
Shogun is masterful in its scale, presentation, and narrative complexity. It finds the classic formula for flawless prestige TV. Its set design, cast, and cinematography sell it as believably epic, but every narrative detail returns to the central psychological conflicts. Toranaga’s brilliant political manipulation plays out against a canvas of betrayal, violence, and brewing war. The miniseries borrows from classic samurai films, but its core is more straightforward. The show’s success has been compared to Game of Thrones with bizarre frequency. The things they have in common aren’t in their content but in their place in the medium. Like Game of Thrones, Shogun steps out of a genre without much widespread buy-in. It earns its place atop pop culture with overwhelming quality and razor-sharp writing. This will be the television event of the season and perhaps well beyond it.
Shogun blew up on two streaming services, one cable network, and nearly every country on Earth. It has universal appeal, growing far beyond the grasp of its predecessor while exceeding its standard of quality. It attained that iconic status through smart readaptation, shifting the outdated, problematic, but exciting narrative into a new world of epic drama. Shogun is a lesson in what a modern TV series needs to succeed. This should be the new high-watermark for action/drama. I can’t think of a person I wouldn’t recommend Shogun to, with the possible exception of those who’ve already seen it.
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