Why 'Shogun' Made Emmys History (and Where It Goes Next)

In his celebratory speech at the Emmy awards last night, Shogun actor Hiroyuki Sanada – who won the outstanding lead actor in a drama series for his role as Lord Yoshii Toranaga – said that “Shogun taught me that when people work together we can make miracles”.

It's been a big week for the cast of Disney+'s critically acclaimed drama, that's for sure.

On 8 September, the show, an epic saga adapted from novelist James Clavell's story of war, passion and power set in feudal Japan, took home an astonishing 14 awards at the 2024 Creative Arts Emmys. These included outstanding period costume, outstanding stunt performance, outstanding visual effects and outstanding music composition. It won all but two of the 16 it was nominated for, and broke the previous record of 13 – set by the 2008 limited series John Adams, on the US founding father.

Fast forward a week later, to the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards, where the show was up against the likes of Baby Reindeer, Slow Horses, 3 Body Problem and Fargo, and it was the talk of the night again. The show was awarded four more Emmys, taking its total haul to 18. Shogun is now the most decorated single season TV series in Emmy history.

It became the first ever Japanese-language series to win outstanding drama series and picked up outstanding directing for a drama series (for Frederick E. O. Toye). But the big celebrations for the cast and crew were its lead actors, Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai, each being presented with the outstanding lead actor and actress (respectively) in a drama series.

The pair became the first Japanese actors ever to win an Emmy, and understandably, emotions were running high when they picked up their awards. Sawai thanked Shogun co-creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks “for believing in me and giving me this role of a lifetime”, and gave a shout out to her mum: “Mum, I love you. You are the reason I'm here. You showed me stoicism, and that's how I was able to portray [Toda] Mariko.” (Mariko is a Catholic convert who acts as a translator between Toranaga and Pilot Major John Blackthorne.)

Sanada was equally moved by the accolade, saying: “Oh, my goodness. I’m beyond honoured to be here with amazing nominees” and went on to thank the team. He added: “It was an East-meets-West dream project, with respect,” Sanada continued. “Shogun taught me that when people work together, we can make a miracle. We can create a better future together.”

It was a critical success from the start. The Guardian’s Rachel Nicholson called it “a mesmerising epic that goes big on the gore”, while Variety’s Alison Herman put the show's success down to “creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo [having] tapped into the true secret sauce of epic television: a balance between sweeping grandeur and intimate psychology.”

In an interview with Esquire, Marks revealed how the series – spoken in period-accurate Japanese, like Shakespearean English – was so meticulously created, “We had about a 900-something-page instruction manual to make this, and it was a cumulation of notes, mistakes, lessons learned, and all the kinds of things we did over the course of production.

"I really wanted it to feel like—even if you're not an expert on Japanese history—that you would feel at least the volume of work that went into it. Every good bit of world-building, when it comes to a historical epic, deserves to be treated like it was crafted just for me to understand.”

All in, as evidenced at the Emmys, it’s a TV battle-winning formula.

The future of Shogun

FX/Disney+ commissioned Shogun series two and three shortly after the original season aired, but there was a bit of an issue: it was only ever meant to be a limited series, as it covered the ending of Clavell’s original 1975 novel.

So what happens next? Well, details are scant, but we do know that showrunners Kondo and Marks are working alongside the Clavell estate, and that they’ve visited Japan on a research trip.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Kondo said: “We’re trying to study his [Clavell’s] process of curation. How did he curate, which events, which characters, which characters can you conveniently combine — those sorts of things that kind of allow you to make something new.”

She added: “There’s a lot of chaos but creative chaos, where we’re throwing everything that we have at the wall, seeing what sticks. It’s been exciting and nerve-wracking because, obviously, this is uncharted territory — we don’t have a roadmap, we just have history.”

Marks said that wherever the next season ended up, we should expect it to get darker: “There’s a lot of great conspiracy theory in history, a lot of different theories about, ‘Oh, it was said that this went on, but this really went on,’ and those little darker corners are what we’ve really enjoyed exploring.”

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