Key Points
It adapts James Clavells classic 1975 novel with ambition and evident respect for its source material, and given that the paperback is more than 1,000 pages long, it is extraordinary that they have managed to condense it into 10 episodes..
It is largely in Japanese, partly in English, which stands in for Portuguese, at times this is not as hard to follow as you might think but it is not the kind of series you can watch in the background as you scroll on a second screen..
Cosmo Jarvis is John Blackthorne, a senior English officer on the good ship Scurvy actually, the Dutch ship Erasmus which has run aground on the shores of Japan, despite the crew not quite believing that this rumoured island nation exists..
But Shgun is keenly aware that this cuts both ways; to the Japanese, Anjin is a mystery, too, revolting and uncouth...
This seems like common sense in a globalised television landscape but it is not hard to imagine that a modern version of Shgun could have been made entirely in English, which would have dented the intellect and power of the story..
