Hacker Cinema
Shōgun
2024 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks
In Japan in the year 1600, at the dawn of a century-defining civil war, Lord Yoshii Toranaga is fighting for his life as his enemies on the Council of Regents unite against him, when a mysterious European ship is found marooned in a nearby fishing village.
9 positive1 negative6 neutralfrom 16 commenters
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16 comments on Hacker News
Swear I recognized location/trees from TV show The Magicians in the latest adaptation of Shogun(standing in for Japan).
Shogun is absolutely fantastic. But it's not quite the same as a for-export production; it was an American-led production team adapting an American novel trying to be as authentically Japanese as possible. With great success. You're absolutely correct about the period language. It seems to have been a hit in Japan, indicating they got it right: https://www.tokyoweekender.com/entertainment/movies-tv/shogun-2024-series-review/
>> The new Shogun has been well received by Western audiences, but it’s been a monster hit among Japanese viewers — possibly because they know the story. They know who Tokugawa Ieyasu is, they know about his rival Ishida Mitsunari and the Battle of Sekigahara the show is building up to. It doesn’t matter that these characters and events have different names in Shogun. It’s not exactly clear why the author did that, but in James Clavell’s novel, Adams is named John Blackthorne and Ieyasu is Yoshii Toranaga.
Various people have pointed out that Japan makes a ton of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jidaigeki shows in a similar style (and with a similar vocabulary, making Shogun comprehensible to JP viewers), but for domestic consumption, and they don't really get exported. I guess having the character of Blackthorne as an anchor is critical for Western viewers.
While we're on the subject, this audience might like https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066473/ , which was a true Japanese-American co-production war movie. Bit of a specialist watch as it's nearly two and a half hours long. Some uncredited assistant direction was done by Kurosawa.
True, but locally-relevant entertainment often doesn’t export well, even if it is extremely well-done. That seems to be changing. Maybe the wider distribution is “commoditizing” personal tastes.
I should note that Germans weren’t the only ones operating subs in WWII (but they were definitely operating the majority of them), so the submarine experience wasn’t unique to Germany.
I also really enjoyed the new Shogun limited series. It deserved every award it got. I heard that the Japanese they spoke was period-accurate, so it was maybe the equivalent of an English-language Shakesperian movie.
I think my point didn't quite come across... Comedy got way more serious and certainly made that (necessary) leap after a big dive in quality during the 00s (thanks Chuck Lorre!). Writers of other genres learned from the successful HBO and AMC productions that TV shows are more than just a fixed universe with a static cast and a dynamic part, and that each episode could be more than one short story told in this staged universe - that is the main part in the leap that makes old shows feel old now.
Thanks for the recommendations, didn't know about The Rehearsal, Shogun, and Reservation Dogs (you wrote "Resevoir Dogs"?). Our tastes may wary, but I think For All Mankind fell back to some 90s formula after season 2.
I wonder what such Germans think of the manners of feudal Japan when watching something like the recent tv show Shogun where it's not about feeling insecure, it's about showing proper respect (according to that culture).
My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
In reality there's a big difference between saying "I want to die in some unforeseeable future" and "I want to die tomorrow"
If you can still see your family, if you can still enjoy an afternoon sitting in the sunshine, if you really want watch the next episode of Shogun, you aren't going to be willing to give up that last bit of existence. Not yet.
> As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read. I'm a picky reader.
I have 70+ plus books on hold at my local library (though the holds have been 'paused' so that they will arrive in a staggered fashion). The library has a limit of 100 books being on hold at a time, but it does have a "bookmark" feature so you can save them for later: I have over 2000 books earmarked for future putting-on-hold.
There's plenty to read.
(I read a bunch of non-fiction on academic-leaning topics (history, economics, science), and often get new things to read from the references of the book I'm currently going through. There's a bunch of fiction too: put a hold on Shogun because of the mini-series.)
> Clavell’s novel was originally made into a miniseries in 1980, one that went on to earn three Golden Globes, three Emmys, and another 11 Emmy nominations. This new Shogun had big sandals to fill, which it did — and then some.
Not to this viewer, it didn't :)
Re-read the book several times over the years and watched the original TV series (which was produced by Clavell himself, BTW), I was looking forward to enjoying the new show, but stopped watching after 4-5 episodes. To me it feels too one-dimensional and grim, even despite the subject matter. The original had more charismatic characters and was more about culture than gore and action.
I was bored and watched a few episodes. IMHO it was a sci-fi cliché. A context about my tastes in my IMDB rankings [1].
I don't watch many series but I think the sci-fi one Severance (2022) was really great. Also the Three Body Problem is very good (haven't read the books). Nowadays I am very entertained with Tokyo Vice and Shogun. I watched "The Fall of the House of Usher" completely but beyond the excellent production it is void (I am a Poe's fan). Ahhh, before I forget, I really enjoyed The Peripheral (2022). Older, but excellent: "The Main in the High Castle". The first chapters are a bit slow but you should pass them to truly appreciate the terrific acting of Rufus Sewell and the series.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings
[2] https://www.primevideo.com/dp/0G0V91T4S396GV99H5BQ27PH5I
> Also ninjas are depicted as super-powerful badasses. Which fits the legend, certainly, but isn't particularly realistic.
It's very likely ninja (or "shinobi", if you're meticulous) didn't exist at all. There must have been spies and assassins, which are already present in Chinese culture which was a big influence in Japanese culture, but the ninja as a stealthy infiltrator, wearing black clothes and special weaponry is a later day invention.
I actually like that in the remade "Shogun" TV show, the "ninja" attack is replaced by a maid who turns out to be an assassin in the payroll of Toranaga's enemies. Not clad in black or with super powers, just a woman who can handle a sword and attacks by surprise.
I've read shogun and now i'm watching the latest TV show. Both are amazing. Is the wife he's buried with Japanese? And he had one in England too?
I'm enjoying the hell out of the Foundation series, and the first couple episodes of Shogun have been great. I'll probably love Neuromancer as well. The trick to enjoying film/TV adaptations of books is to never read the books beforehand.
And they're going from binge-watching ad-free episode of an entire series, to releasing one episode a week... with adverts.
Yeah, no thanks. I'll just VPN+torrent the ad-free version and watch that, thanks. On any device of my choosing as well.
And why should I pay £8.99 or whatever to one streaming service, for one programme, that was previously "free to air" for the other series? Paramount taking back Star Trek from Netflix for example.
I'm not sure how many multi-million dollar, unseen cancelled-after-one-season dramas with 50,000 viewers these studios need to create before they realise 'we need viewers to 'build a franchise' and make a profit'.
Just imagine if these series or dramas were only seen by a few thousand people at most: Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Band of Brothers, Shogun, Dallas, Cheers and so on. Even How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory were pretty much pre-streaming when they started, but syndicated to world-wide terrestrial channels.
The miniseries "Shogun" broke ground by not dubbing the Japanese into English. What they did was carefully craft things so you could reliably guess what they were saying.
It was a big success.
I had the same experience with French. I learned it for 10 years, I even won a national essay competition - guess what, when I was in France, I couldn't open my mouth. English on the other hand - I had only 2 years of study under my belt, and lots and lots of practice - movies, programming books, Shogun by James Clavell, song lyrics, chats on IRC, and so on. I'm fairly confident in my English skills. I know Russian a fair bit, and it's just a consequence of living in Moldova, where we have a lot of Russian influence and a lot of speakers of the language (16%) - but since I don't use it every day, I tend to forget it.