Shogun Is Nothing Like Game Of Thrones!

Shogun, a kinda-historical TV series set in 17th-century Japan and currently on its eighth of ten episodes, absolutely rules. We've discussed this; it has, as Gita says, "The Juice".

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Shogun Has The Juice

Something Gita also discussed, albeit in passing, was that at the time of Shogun's debut some people had already drawn a line between it and Game of Thrones:

On places like Twitter, people have been comparing this new series to Game of Thrones, which isn’t exactly accurate.

In the intervening weeks, these comparisons have only gotten louder and more numerous. Here's a selection of headlines about Shogun from movie and entertainment sites from the last couple of months:

NME: ‘Shōgun’ TV series is being called “the new ‘Game Of Thrones'” by critics

Screen Rant: 2024's Game Of Thrones Replacement Confirmed By Gory 2-Minute Scene That Makes It A Must Watch

Variety: FX Miniseries ‘Shōgun’ Is the Most Transportive TV Epic Since ‘Game of Thrones’: TV Review

EW: Inside Shōgun, the Game of Thrones-sized samurai epic

Every time I see headlines like these--the Screen Rant one in particular is a fresh kind of embarrassment--I wonder if anyone writing them has ever actually seen either of these shows. Let's break this down very simply: Game of Thrones was a lavish fantasy production--based on a book series debuting in 1996--that ran for around three seasons too long, cost like a billion dollars to make and was full to the brim with sex, betrayal and violence. People loved it because people love that shit.

Shogun is a 2024 TV series based on a 1975 novel that, while ostensibly fictional, actually lifts a lot of its bigger story beats straight from the annals of history. It is also beautifully shot, occasionally features violence (and does not shy from it when it does) and has its share of political intrigue. It's far more interested in sexual tension than it is outright depictions of the act.

You may see some similarities there, in the same way a small child might look at an apple and an orange and know they're both food. But these shows are entirely different experiences, made from different perspectives, and to even remotely suggest they're somehow linked, or that Shogun is some kind of Thrones successor, is a pretty damning indictment on the state of major entertainment press!

Things have got so bad that the show's director, Jonathan van Tulleken, had to go public with a redirection attempt, telling the BBC last month:

While van Tulleken acknowledged the adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 tome is “an epic, a spectacle,” he told the BBC this morning that a better comparison would be another HBO series, Succession, along with Netflix’s House of Cards.

“Truly it is a character piece and it is about this intrigue,” he told the Today program. “This is a dangerous world where violence can come out of nowhere but the real danger is in the machinations. A conversation can be as dangerous as anything else. A better comparison [than Game of Thrones] would be Succession or House of Cards.”

Imagine being the director behind one of the best TV shows in years and having to explicitly come out and say "You people whose job it is to cover this business are completely wrong, my show is nothing like that show, here are two shows it's actually like that you have not mentioned once".

Maybe the comparisons keep being made because there is SEO juice to be squeezed from their headlines. Maybe people just really are that superficial with their media and can't tell an apple from an orange so long as both of them have swords in them. Either way, Shogun is not Game of Thrones. It's OK to enjoy it--and write about it--for what it is! It's really good, it has beautiful sets, a wonderful cast, some killer lighting–there's plenty to write about on its own merits without dragging an entirely unrelated show that ended five years ago into the discussion every time you talk about it!