The Occidental Tourist

Shōgun

starring Anna Sawai, Hiroyuki Sanada, Cosmo Jarvis, Tadanobu Asano, Moeka Hoshi, Takehiro Hira and Shinnosuke Abe

created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks (Counterpart)

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Can you spoiler something that is thinly veiled history? The basics of the story have been around for like 400 years, if you haven't heard it by now...

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There's a story Jason Alexander tells about being on Seinfeld in the early days, where he's trying to figure out the character of George, but he's kind of struggling. At one point he reads a script where something absolutely ridiculous happens to George that absolutely strains the suspension of disbelief, so he goes to the writer and says "Look, about this script, this would never happen to anybody and if it did, there's no way any human would respond this way," to which the writer responded "What are you talking about? This definitely happened to me and this is exactly how I responded." By now you probably guessed: that writer? Jeffery Dahmer.

No, that's a joke, that kind of perspective would have made Seinfeld in some ways at least compelling and watchable instead of the absolutely unrelenting cringe-fest that has aged worse than Married... With Children. That isn't a joke really, if you watch M...WC these days, it looks like a time capsule, perfectly pitched to the swamp of crudeness it was born in (early Fox TV, bad lighting on harsh video, lazy jokes leaning on sexualization and gender cliches) so the political incorrectness now feels defanged by seeming desperate, to the point of almost being quaint. Seinfeld is just a reflection of Jerry Seinfeld overall, whose presence on anything in the 2020s is an automatic no-go for me: smug, self-serious, small-minded, weightless and artless while always LOUDLY INSISTING on both his integrity and his own hilarity. If you feel like that's too harsh, watch Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is Seinfeld without Seinfeld: it's loose, artistic, risky, messy, crass, willing to swing and miss and actually funny. Probably not a coincidence.

How did I get here? Oh right! The gravitational pull of how much Jerry Seinfeld sucks can really divert a line of thinking. Anyway, sometimes you hear a story and you think "this is too far, I can't stick with this," but it turns out a story about an English guy who ended up interacting with and advising the most powerful person in Japan in about 1600 is actually based on a real thing. The names and the details of events are changed in Shōgun as a work of fiction, but the veneer is a single-coat stain, no primer, so all the wood grain is visible underneath.

It's simultaneously an adaptation of James Clavell's 1975 novel and the 1980 TV miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain (I think all miniseries at the time were required to star Richard Chamberlain. Union rules). There's almost no way I saw it when it first came out (I'd have been 5 or 6) but I definitely saw it at some point in my youth on some rerun. My memory of it is just a few flashes, like the earthquake sequence and one exchange when Richard Chamberlain balks at being offered the company of a courtesan and, when asked if he'd prefer a male one, angrily denies being a "God-cursed sodomite," which struck me as funny at the time, even though it'd be much later that I'd understand the almost subliminal irony. Otherwise I remember it being very colorful and kind of goofy, a bit overcooked (an Orson Welles voice-over narration!) and very, very exotic.

And that's what the 2024 version has absolutely zero time for: exoticism, orientalism, fetishization. The costumes are still elaborate and period-evocative, but the presentation doesn't leave any room to see the non-western characters as anything other than characters. The 1980 miniseries famously did not translate any of the spoken Japanese, filtering all the understanding of the story through the eyes and ears of the whichever Europeans happened to be present, keeping the Japanese cast as inscrutable and explicably foreign as any 1980 production might be expected to. Everything passed through Richard Chamberlain's expertly blow-dried head before it got to us. In retrospect, imagining anyone or anything mitigating between an audience and its experience of Toshiro Mifune is insulting and wasteful, for everyone involved.

We're spared that kind of bullshit in 2024, so we get to experience Hiroyuki Sanada in the same role directly. It's clear from the beginning that Cosmo Jarvis' John Blackthorne is barely a pawn, more a lamprey on the side of a series of increasingly larger fish. Any control or even influence he feels is thwarted time and again by reveals (almost every episode) that his wants and needs, really any agency he begins to imagine for himself, is the blind end of a complicated political double-bluff at varying levels executed by other people who are too busy for his bullshit. His survival feels like a series of accidents, which to be fair, is probably pretty accurate for anyone over 25 in 1600 or thereabouts.

Sanada's Toranaga still gets very little revealed internality, but instead of being the victim of western writers not being able to imagine a Japanese person as a person, who he is comes out at a rush in one conversation toward the end of the final episode, with Tadanobu Asano's Yabushige, that finally contextualizes every move, every inflection, every subtle smirk or harsh word in the nine episodes preceding. Playing it tight ends in a satisfying payoff of the characterization built over the full 10 hours. It encapsulates literally every measurable story beat, further complicating every sacrifice and tragedy of an already knotty and bloody plot. Proportionally he doesn't have a ton of lines or screen time, but his choices and presence (or even the threat of) have to carry everything. Luckily, he remembers he's Hiroyuki Sanada, so he pulls it off with very little visible effort.

Sanada is complemented by the two other principle point-of-view characters, portrayed Jarvis and Anna Sawai. I don't know that I ever really came around on Jarvis' performance all the way, but the role is mostly "frustrated tourist," involving a lot of grumbling and stomping and shouting, primarily about the treachery of Catholics (which, you know, fair enough). Like Sanada, the true nature of his character's role is only really revealed at the end, where he's finally allowed to express a few more colors, and I felt a bit more sympathetic toward kind of a doormat character. Anna Sawai is great, probably the best audience analogue for centering us in the historical moment. It's a tribute to both the writing and her performance that she's not burdened with a bunch of expositional lectures to the smelly Englishman and instead is allowed to breathe life into the reality of what they are trying to convey through the suffering and endurance of this one woman in these circumstances, both high politics and the bloodily personal. It's the fact that she doesn't play the restraint that makes it all the more either chilly or tragic when the necessity to reel it in is imposed on her.

I could talk about this a lot more, but this is the second week in a row I'm reviewing I thing and I can really go on and on. For Shōgun, a lot rides on the writing, the production design and the performances of the leads, but the life of any story is in the secondary characters and this one really lucked out in Tadanobu Asano and Moeka Hoshi who end up embodying, respectively, the high intrigue and the personal stakes of the interweaving stories. It's like they're the Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander of this thing, but if you had replaced a dud like Jerry Seinfeld with someone sublimely good, like Hiroyuki Sanada. You'd have to had called that show something else, but I'm failing to see the downside there either.