Finally: A Good TV Show With Swords in It

Hulu's "Shōgun" is scratching an itch that has gone untended for so long.

Hulu/FX

The explosion of internet streaming and the global audience’s vast appetite for entertainment has created a vast glut of television. There are, to put it simply, so many shows. Making good shows, however, is difficult, and while the past several years have been rife with successes (White Lotus, Succession, The Bear) and things that are not good but have comfortably poleaxed my frontal lobe in tough times (Emily in Paris, 5,000 other things like The Recruit on Netflix), we have, since the ignominious end of Game of Thrones, had a conspicuously sword-shaped hole in the essential, big-budget TV viewing lineup.

Shōgun, which began airing on Hulu yesterday, is hitting that spot. That’s all I can say! It has swords. It has guys talking in funny little accents and voices and a whole lot of other dudes talking in another language (in this case, Japanese) that they use aesthetically pleasing sans-serif subtitles for. It has, most importantly, a budget that is going to work.

This last point is what makes Shōgun so appealing to me. It does not look cheap. It looks good. There is plenty of CGI, of course, as no show can exist without it these days, but much of the action appears shot on real sets with real people and in real lighting conditions. There is no use of deep shadow to conceal an overreliance on second-rate visual effects. There is no use of deep shadow to create… I have no idea, unwatchable bullshit? Sure, there are dark scenes. But you can see the things you want to see, and see them well, and they are good (the cinematography is excellent). Look here: a gorgeous collection of shots from the first episode.

But all of this belies perhaps the most important point: swords. I have only seen one episode of Shōgun but so far it features quite a lot of swords. The swords look good. We have yet to see anyone actually fight anyone with swords (we have had an implied seppuku, a quick decapitation, and some general sword-waving), but I am confident that when we do get to the parts with sword fighting it is going to be good. This is important to me, as a man with the interests and temperament of a teenage boy. The costumes are fantastic. The sets are fantastic. The acting is competent and at some points compelling. In my group chats my friends are saying things like “TV is back, baby!!” They are planning for watch parties, which in my experience are always way more fun conceptually than they are in practice (Unless your home can devote an entire couch or at least half a couch to each guest then it is inferior to my home, where I have one very big couch that my wife and I can lie on.)

It is clear that this show was both a labor of love and a tremendous financial gamble. Period shows are expensive to make; period shows with expansive sets and lots of battles (assumedly) even more so. They are putting money money into this thing; $250 million, allegedly. It is all based on a popular but not ubiquitous novel of the same name from the 70s. There are many intersecting plotlines and a vast power struggle playing out between morally complex characters. The “protagonist” per se is a bloodthirsty imperialist anti-hero who hates Catholics, and his foils in the Japanese kingdoms are equal parts sympathetic and psychotically ruthless (they put a guy to death in a particularly “Viserys Targaryen but worse” way in the first episode.) There are High Stakes and assumedly Romance and a whole lot of Plotting, all given their full due. I love it. I am going to watch the rest of it. Finally, a good show with swords.