FX’s New Historical Epic Is a Runaway Hit. I Know the Real Reason Viewers Love It So Much.

Over the weekend, I found myself hesitant to press play on Shōgun, FX’s new hit show adapted from James Clavell’s bestselling novel. That’s not because I was suspicious of the rapturous early critical response to the limited series or because I didn’t trust the creators to adjust some of the Orientalist motifs present in the source material. No, my reluctance was much more primitive: I simply didn’t want to endure what would almost certainly be an agonizing dirge of exposition.

That trial seemed basically unavoidable. Clavell’s book, which became a genuine 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 both the terminus of Japan’s warring states period and the European wars of religion. Functionally, that meant that Shōgun’s pilot would need to distill a whole bunch of tiresome minutiae: the colonial assets of both Protestant and Catholic dominions, Japanese military decorum, the fine lines of distinction between the empire and the shogunate, and so on. All that throat-clearing doesn’t typically add up to compelling television.

And yet, within the first few moments of its premiere, Shōgun reveals itself to be miraculously unburdened by all of that shit. The show disposes of all of the tedious table-setting and drills deep into the plotty heart of the matter, proudly embracing the titillating thrills the average viewer is chasing when they decide to tune in to a historical epic called Shōgun. The series is free of all of the extracurricular homework that has become so central to the modern entertainment apparatus; blessedly, you won’t need to listen to any podcasts or skulk in any forums in order to procure a basic semblance of who’s who. Nor will Shōgun humiliate your gaps of knowledge, forcing you to reach for the pause button so you can futilely scan the Wikipedia page for “Sengoku period” in hopes of catching up with the script. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this quality makes Shōgun the best show currently on television. It’s rollicking, violent, transcendently silly, often incisive, and most importantly, totally legible—a rare enough feat that it bears highlighting.

Shōgun does provide some basic epochal scaffolding for the audience, to start out with. A few lines of text set the stage in the opening scene: The year is 1600, Japan is the crown jewel of the Portuguese monarchy’s global trading empire, and a fleet of roving anglophone Protestants is in search of the island so that it may pillage it. Typically, a studio would use this premise to introduce hundreds of different characters, each carrying their own complex interiority and motivation, in order to flesh out the epic scope of Japanese feudal society. While a great show could be forged with that formula, Shōgun instead, mercifully, asks us to worry about exactly two men in 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 with his political rivals, is set to become the titular shōgun by the series’ end.

The animating principles of these 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 way to slip in vital exposition. Meanwhile, Sanada’s Toranaga is pure, uncut trope: a reluctant hero taking quiet walks in the rock gardens of Osaka, soliloquizing about 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 one of his prisoners alive in a gigantic stone pot, afterward remarking that he is disappointed by the lack of vibrancy in the unlucky man’s tormented death rattle. This is not to say that these characters are thinly written, so much 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 (looking at you, Barry), that is an incredible relief.

Shōgun’s closest thematic analog might be Game of Thrones, in the sense that both shows feature a cast of charismatic but selfish, sadistic, and emotionally stunted characters who are all ultimately out for their own gain. The two series also share imaginative ultra-violence, candlelit medieval subterfuge, and the occasional grim sex scene deployed to illustrate some sort of bad-feeling power dynamic. The difference is that Game of Thrones was frequently blemished by anemic midseason episodes wherein everyone sits around a wooden 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 appeared to be made for the most dogmatic and annoying Silmarillion-heads, but I digress.)

Shōgun, on the other hand, lets nothing stand in the path of its relentless momentum. All of the administrative overhead is handled instantaneously—the sets are brightly lit and awash in both 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 bit of Portuguese, and so do the translators. How do we know that one of Toranaga’s subjects committed a social faux pas? Because the disgraced samurai threatens to commit seppuku on the spot. I have been trained to feel clueless when I watch television—to reserve 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 new kind 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 might be true, but let us not be too arrogant to overlook the show’s primary appeal: We love Shōgun because we know what’s going on, and frankly, that shouldn’t be nearly as rare as it is.