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Big, Sweeping Television Is Back


What Shōgun’s incredible awards season performance says about the series, the Emmys, and the state of epic TV.

That assumption tracked with the show’s source material, a closed-ended 1975 novel by James Clavel, as well as the previous TV incarnation of Shōgun, which ran as a five-part miniseries on ABC in 1980. “It’s a type of drama genre that voters are very comfortable with perceiving as ‘good,’” Vulture’s TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk put it to me when I inquired about Shōgun ’s particular appeal. In many ways, it felt old-fashioned, despite its impeccable modern production value and an international spirit that stepped all of TV toward an idea of what big, impressive projects can be moving forward.

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