Best Ever
Historical Drama Series?

The first scene establishes the rules: a man is boiled alive, slowly, while political adversaries discuss protocol. This is Japan in 1600, the brief interregnum between Toyotomi rule and Tokugawa consolidation, and Shōgun announces immediately that it will not soften the period’s brutality for Western comfort. The execution proceeds. The conversation continues. Power, the scene argues, is exercised through patience as much as violence—through the willingness to wait while others suffer, to maintain composure while making a point.

FX’s ten-episode adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 novel arrives four decades after the 1980 miniseries made Richard Chamberlain a star and introduced American audiences to a (heavily romanticized) vision of feudal Japan. The new version, created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, takes a different approach: approximately seventy percent of the dialogue is in Japanese, the non-Japanese protagonist functions more as witness than hero, and the political machinations that Clavell based on actual history receive the complexity they deserve.

Hiroyuki Sanada’s Lord Toranaga dominates the series without dominating scenes. His performance operates through subtraction—the controlled gestures, the measured pauses, the face that reveals nothing while calculating everything. Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, who would become the first Tokugawa shogun and unify Japan for two and a half centuries, but the series presents him in the moment before that triumph, when his position is precarious and his enemies numerous. Sanada, who also produced, brings five decades of screen experience to bear on a character who must appear weak while being strong, must seem reactive while orchestrating.

Anna Sawai’s Lady Mariko provides the emotional center. A Catholic convert whose father committed one of history’s most infamous betrayals, Mariko navigates between cultures—translating for the English pilot Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), serving Toranaga while maintaining her own agenda, carrying shame and faith in proportions that shift across episodes. Sawai’s performance modulates between the composure her station demands and the feeling that composure is designed to conceal. The series’ most devastating sequences belong to her.

Jarvis’s Blackthorne—the Englishman shipwrecked in Japan, based on the historical William Adams—functions as entry point without becoming protagonist. The adaptation’s smartest choice is reducing his centrality; where Clavell’s novel used Blackthorne’s perspective to guide Western readers through unfamiliar territory, the series trusts its audience to follow multiple viewpoints, multiple languages, multiple schemes operating at cross-purposes. Blackthorne learns. We learn with him. But the story isn’t about his education—it’s about the world he’s stumbled into.

The production design reconstructs 1600 Japan with resources unavailable to the 1980 version: practical sets built to historical specifications, costumes researched down to stitching patterns, attention to ritual and hierarchy that makes every scene feel inhabited rather than performed. The violence, when it comes, is neither gratuitous nor sanitized; seppuku, in particular, receives treatment that honors its cultural weight rather than reducing it to spectacle.

The series structure mirrors the political rhythms it depicts. Episodes build slowly, layering conversations and glances, before erupting into consequences that reframe everything preceding. The penultimate episode contains a sequence—Mariko at the Osaka castle—that achieves a catharsis the entire series has been constructing. It’s patient storytelling, prestige-TV pacing applied to material that rewards patience, each episode ending with shifts in advantage that require recalculating allegiances.

Critical reception positioned Shōgun as a corrective to earlier adaptations’ Orientalism, and the corrective is real. Japanese characters have interiority that previous versions denied them; Japanese culture is presented as complex rather than exotic; the collision between European and Japanese worldviews produces genuine inquiry rather than simple hierarchy. But the series also works as pure narrative: ten hours of political chess played by masters, with stakes that include not just individual lives but the shape of a nation.

The 1980 Shōgun ended with a sense of completion—Blackthorne assimilated, Toranaga triumphant, Japan explained to Western satisfaction. The 2024 version ends differently, with costs acknowledged and futures uncertain. The history that followed—Tokugawa supremacy, centuries of isolation, eventual forced opening to the West—shadows everything without being stated. What we’ve watched is a beginning, one possible origin of a Japan that would eventually confront the descendants of men like Blackthorne on very different terms.

FX renewed the series for additional seasons before the first finished airing. Whether continuation serves the story or dilutes it remains to be seen. But these ten episodes stand complete: a historical epic that trusts its audience with complexity, that finds drama in protocol as much as battle, that understands power as performance and performance as survival.

Decide for Yourself:

• The series streams on Hulu (and Disney+ internationally), where the full ten episodes can be experienced as the novel-for-television they’re designed as.
• James Clavell’s original novel remains in print, its doorstop length (1,100+ pages) providing the depth the series necessarily condenses.
• The 1980 miniseries, available on various streaming platforms and DVD, offers useful comparison—same source material, radically different execution.