FX Is Finally Moving Forward with Its SHOGUN Samurai Series
A couple of years ago FX announced that they were developing a limited series based on the classic 1975 Samurai novel, Shogun. Well, the network has announced that they are finally moving forward with it.
It was also revealed that Justin Marks (The Jungle Book, Saved!, Top Gun: Maverick) and Rachel Kondo will be bringing the series to life with producer Tim Van Patten (The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, The Pacific, Perry Mason) onboard.
The series was described as being as epic and gritty as Game of Thrones. Shogun was written by James Clavell, and the story is set in feudal Japan and "charts the collision of two ambitious men from different worlds and a mysterious female samurai: John Blackthorne, a risk-taking English sailor who ends up shipwrecked in Japan, a land whose unfamiliar culture will ultimately redefine him; Lord Toranaga, a shrewd, powerful daimyo, at odds with his own dangerous, political rivals; and Lady Mariko, a woman with invaluable skills but dishonorable family ties, who must prove her value and allegiance."
I think it will work much better as a series than a film. It will give the creative team the ability to properly tell the story and develop the characters.
Here's the full description from the book:
A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in an extraordinary saga of a time and a place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust, and the struggle for power.
Here is the world-famous novel of Japan that is the earliest book in James Clavell’s masterly Asian saga. Set in the year 1600, it tells the story of a bold English pilot whose ship was blown ashore in Japan, where he encountered two people who were to change his life: a warlord with his own quest for power, and a beautiful interpreter torn between two ways of life and two ways of love.
The principal figures are John Blackthorne, whose dream it is to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, to wrest control of the trade between Japan and China from Portuguese, and to return home a man of wealth and position; Toranaga, the most powerful feudal lord in Japan, who strives and schemes to seize ultimate power by becoming Shogun—the Supreme Military Dictator—and to unite the warring samurai fiefdoms under his own masterly and farsighted leadership; and the Lady Mariko, a Catholic convert whose conflicting loyalties to the Church and her country are compounded when she falls in love with Blackthorne, the barbarian intruder.
In dramatizing how a Westerner, the representative man of his time, comes to be altered by his exposure to an alien culture, Mr. Clavell provides a spellbinding depiction of a nation seething with violence and intrigue as it moves from the medieval world to the modern.
FX tends to produce solid high-quality shows, so this is something that’s worth looking forward to.