On Sunday night, FX’s Shogun extended its reign as host of the 2024 Emmy Awards. After winning 14 awards at the Creative Arts Emmys a week ago, the popular samurai series held the record for the most wins by any show in a single year going into the evening. However, the show additionally solidified its standard inside the Peacock Theater at the Prime Time Emmys, winning four extra awards, including the top categories of Best Drama Series, Best Actress in a Drama Series for Anna Sawai, Best Actor in a Drama Series for Hiroyuki Sanada, and best drama directing for Frederick E.O. Toye.
Shogun’s victory is momentous on a few fronts. The historic awards haul represents an enormous success for FX and parent organization Disney for an expensive series that required almost 10 years to bring to completion and when seemed to be an exceptionally dubious bet. It’s likewise a significant second for Asian portrayal and non-English-language TV. Shogun is the absolute first larger part non-English-language series to win in the remarkable show series classification (Netflix’s Korean sensation Squid Game was selected in 2022 yet lost to HBO’s Succession), and Sanada and Sawai are the very first Japanese actors to win Emmys.
Sanada said backstage at the Emmy Awards that he “felt the weight of the moment and what it all means historically” when he arrived on stage to accept his award. One of Japan’s few top actors to move over to Hollywood in a significant manner, Sanada started acting in Tokyo almost 60 years ago as a child star, apprenticing under the legendary star Sonny Chiba. He said his best actor win likewise made him think “all my peers and teachers who have taught me since I was a child.”
“As far as the next generation,” Sanada added, “I hope they see a lot of meaning in our nominations and wins and just understand that we created a period Japanese series that really connected with the world.”
Japanese cinema was perceived as far back as 1951 when Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the 24th Academy Awards. Miyoshi Umeki later won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1957 for Sayonara opposite Marlon Brando. However, acknowledgment of Japanese ability on the little screen has been a lot later coming. Beforehand, just Japanese actor Masi Oka, named for outstanding supporting actor for Heroes in 2007, had gotten a drama series nod from the TV Academy.
Behind the stage at the Emmys, Sawai said that when she separated into tears while accepting her Best Actress in a Drama Series award, it was likely her “twelfth time crying today.”
“I’ve just been a mess,” she added. “I think it’s just mixed emotions and anxiety, wanting everyone to win… I’ll wake up tomorrow and I’ll think this was all a dream.”
However, despite Shogun’s meteoric rise to the top of Emmy history on Sunday night, it didn’t come without some hard-fought losses. Billy Crudup took best supporting actor in a drama for The Morning Show over cult Japanese Tadanobu Asano, whose performance as the wily samurai Kashigi Yabushige was a Shogun fan #1. In the drama writing category, Apple TV+’s Slow Horses defeated the FX series’ writers room, which condensed James Clavell’s 1975 best-selling novel of 1,312 pages into 10 hour-long episodes of television.
Shogun might be FX’s most-watched series ever (in light of global hours streamed), however, it’s really the second television adaptation of Clavell’s sprawling book. A deeply influential epic about duty, honor, and the battle for power in Feudal Japan, the novel was previously adapted by Paramount Television in 1980. Shot on location in Japan with the greatest budget at any point spent on a television series at the time, the first Shogun became a pop culture sensation when it circulated on NBC. The series acquired 12 Emmy nominations at the 1981 Emmys, winning for Outstanding Limited Series, Costume Design, and Best Title Sequence.
Paramount’s adaptation ended where the story of Clavell’s beloved book concludes, as does the first season of FX’s Shogun. Co-creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo pleased fans in May with the disclosure that Disney greenlit two additional seasons of the show. Sanada, who produces Shogun as well as featuring Lord Toranaga, has started teasing thoughts regarding what may be available for the story’s next chapters. After Sunday night’s Emmys celebrations wind down, the Shogun innovative group clearly has a difficult, but not impossible task ahead as they attempt to support Lord Toranaga’s Emmys reign by adding two, entirely original seasons to the adventure.