Read in Japanese.

By now you’ve probably skimmed a headline or two proclaiming FX’s 2024 remake of Shogun the second coming of Game of Thrones, and they’re not wrong. Yet this doesn’t go far enough, because well before season 8, and really as soon as Benioff and Weiss ran out of George R.R. Martin’s prose, Game of Thrones was bad, the dense machinations and intricate plotting of seasons 1 through 4 giving way to increasingly expensive shots of Daenerys burning everyone.

Shogun is, based on its first two episodes alone, set to be the best epic drama to premier in a decade, reaching all the way back not to that time when Arya leapt six feet vertically into the air (or whatever) to kill the Night King, but to when Tyrion Lannister put a bolt in Tywin’s bowels and then hitched a cargo ship to Braavos. In all aspects this show is impeccable.

The year is 1600. In England, Elizabeth I is nearing the end of her 45-year reign and William Shakespeare is busy writing Hamlet; In Holland, the Habsburgs have been expelled from the Low Countries and the Dutch Republic is emerging as Northern Europe’s major power; in Latin America, Portugal and Spain are solidifying their conquest of the New World; and in Japan, the Sengoku Jidai, the almost 150-year “Warring States Period” of lawlessness and civil war immortalized on-screen in countless Kurosawa films, is drawing to a close. Change is in the air. The vultures gather. Enter Toranaga.

The strongest and most trusted warlord of the recently deceased Taiko, or military leader, Yoshii Toranaga sits on the Council of Regents entrusted with educating and protecting the Taiko’s heir, Nakamura Yaechiyo, until the boy has come of age and is fit to rule the country. There’s just one problem: his rival Ishido Kazunari has united the other three regents (two of whom are also converts to the recently introduced religion of Catholicism) against him, imprisoning Toranaga in the capitol at Osaka Castle in anticipation of an impeachment that will double as his death warrant.

In a masterful scene of tension all the more powerful for eschewing direct violence, Hiroyuki Sanada’s Toranaga engages in verbal sparring with his rivals before, stung by an insult to his lord, Usami Tadayoshi, one of his samurai, rushes to his defense, nearly plunging the entire meeting into an orgy of bloodshed. Knowing they’re outnumbered, Toranaga rebukes his vassal, who vows to commit seppuku and extinguish his own bloodline in shame.

From this moment Shogun begins to show the maturity of its script, which was composed over a now-famously dense 2 year process of translation, re-translation and rewrite to render it equally compelling in both English and Japanese (The dialogue splits about 30-70 by my estimate). Unlike the 1980 Shogun show, which cut vast sections of the novel where Richard Chamberlain’s John Blackthorne was absent, and left much of the Japanese content untranslated, 2024’s Shogun is fully subtitled, in one of the many ways the show broadens the eurocentric outlook of its original. For a show that leans heavily on dialogue, it is a testament to Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks’ skill that even at its most restrained moments, Shogun remains tense and compelling.

By broadening the show’s perspective compared to the original, Shogun gives a great role to lead actor and producer Hiroyuki Sanada, Hollywood’s go-to guy for all things “elder-statseman-samurai” and a key consultant on period accuracy.

First introduced to Western audiences as the steely-eyed samurai lieutenant Ujio in 2003’s The Last Samurai, Sanada has emulated and surpassed former co-star Ken Watanabe’s, or really any other Japanese actor’s, breakthrough from Japanese to Western film over the previous two decades, and he wears the mantle of elder statesman effortlessly, his gentle, principled demeanor with those he trusts at one with the calculating ruthlessness he holds in reserve as he plans to outmaneuver and destroy his enemies.

At base, he is the “warrior who seeks peace” in Sanada’s words, modeled after the historical Tokugawa Ieyasu, the last and greatest of the Three Great Unifiers of Japan during the early modern period, who founded a shogunate lasting 260 years until the modern era. Like Sanada’s own Shimazu Koji in John Wick 4, Toranaga is a man of dignity and  refinement, but latent, furious power.

And yet, like a more competent Ned Stark, he remains a reluctant hero, keenly aware of his disadvantaged position against his rival lords and reluctant to emulate the legacy of his Minowara bloodline, his ancestors (based on the historical Minamoto) who were the last to effectively wield the title of Shogun. Though Toranaga dismisses the title as a “brutal relic from a bygone era”, he is obviously on a collision course with destiny, and will have to decide whether to accept his path or die.

Soon an opportunity appears to even the odds. While Toranaga is receiving news of his now-imminent impeachment, a Dutch pirate vessel crewed by sick and emaciated European Protestants crashes on the shores of Anjiro, a fishing village under the control of Toranaga’s utterly treacherous and certifiably batshit vassal Kashigi Yabushige, played by the wonderfully maniacal Tadanobu Asano.

When Yabushige witnesses the bizarre spectacle of the town’s Catholic priest clamoring for his fellow Europeans’ heads (compounded by the Protestant John Blackthorne spitting on a Catholic cross), he realizes there’s more to this “Christian nonsense” than meets the eye, and plots to sell Blackthorne to Ishido and betray Toranaga.

This goes cock-up when Muraji, a Japanese Christian spy in the village, informs Toranaga of the ship’s arrival, leading him to dispatch his vassal Toda Hiromatsu to commandeer Blackthorne and take him to Osaka, paving the way for Toranaga to sow division between the Catholic lords on the Council while acquiring a large supply of guns in the process.

Meanwhile, Blackthorne receives a crash course in Japanese customs from his new frenemy Vasco Rodrigues, a Spanish sailor and expat who ridicules Blackthorne’s chauvinism while keeping their own countries’ religious, political, and economic conflicts front and center in an increasingly antagonistic relationship. Meanwhile, Yabushige boils one of Blckthorne’s men alive and then, for good measure, orders his samurai to produce a tanka on the spot commemorating the now-roasted barbarian’s death.

Shogun is a massive step for Western television in the centrality and accuracy it brings to an Asian epic, but even as it excels in its representation of a powerful and dynamic Japanese cast, it manages to avoid the more tedious elements that often hamper attempts to combat the lenses of orientalism and white supremacy.

Cosmos Jarvis’s John Blackthorne is reduced, in a sense, from the unitary focus given to Richard Chamberlain’s character in the 1980 adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun, but rather than the bumbling stereotype of stupidity or rapacity he would be consigned to in a lesser production, Jarvis’ Blackthorne is neither blue-eyed devil nor white savior. Masculine, charismatic, cunning, and ruthless, his portrayal has been widely likened to Tom Hardy, though he remains in the eyes of his Japanese captors no dashing hero but an ill-mannered savage.

Some great work emerges in his conflict with Asano’s Yabushige when Blackthorne successfully manipulates samurai notions of honor to force the latter into a dangerous attempt to rescue Rodrigues, who is thrown overboard at one point during the journey by ship to Osaka. Blackthorne is amazed at Yabushige’s resolution to commit suicide when for a moment he seems doomed to drown, an attitude Rodrigues ascribes to the Japanese concept of shukumei, or acceptance of one’s fate.

As earlier, when Yabushige prevents Hiromatsu from an attempt to kill Blackthorne out of respect for piloting them through a storm, Shogun rejects simplistic morality tales, and takes a nuanced view of cultural conflict where mutual prejudice is capable of existing simultaneously beside well-earned respect. Just as Toranaga hopes to play Blackthorne as a pawn against the Catholics, so the Englishman hopes to enlist his efforts against his enemies, the Portuguese. Everyone is scheming for one thing or another.

Though she is given comparatively less space in the pilot than in the second episode, the pilot teases the importance and consummate self-control of Anna Sawai’s Toda Mariko, a Japanese Catholic and skilled linguist who is connected to Toranaga by marriage to one of his retainers and is the daughter-in-law of his lieutenant Toda Hiromatsu. In a particularly gripping scene, as Fujii, the wife of Toranaga’s previously disgraced samurai Tadayoshi, holds a tanto to her neck in defiance of her husband’s promise to surrender their child to death, Mariko talks her down into accepting her fate and refusing suicide out of loyalty to their lord.

As a bridge between worlds, Mariko will inevitably be caught up in the struggle between the duplicitous Portuguese, her lord Toranaga, and his rivals, her duel identities as Nihonjin and Christian tested in the process. Despite being held in relative reserve for the first hour, Sawai telegraphs the traits that look set to define Mariko in the coming episodes: steeliness, dexterity, and the ability to harness absolute discipline in the service of her calculating intellect, matched with the fearlessness needed to openly confront men in a brutally patriarchal pre-modern society. While she will eventually become, among other things, the love interest of Blackthorne, Sawai establishes Mariko as a capable political player in her own right, adept at subverting the limitations imposed on her by gender.

The board is set. Lavish costumes, meticulously created sets, political intrigue, and brutal violence: Shogun has it all, and it radiates confidence. A sumptuous period piece and dazzling epic, this series promises to equal or surpass peak Game of Thrones.

Benjamin Rose is a poet from Washington D.C. and the author of Elegy For My Youth (2023) and Dust Is Over All (2024).  He studied English at the Catholic University of America and is the winner of the 2023 O’Hagan Poetry Prize. From 2019 he has edited The Path. Buy his books here.

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