‘Shogun’ 1980 Miniseries Director Calls Out FX Show as “Not Entertaining” for American Audiences

The recent first season of the FX series Shogun has continued its awards success into 2025, with the acclaimed show prevailing at Saturday’s WGA Awards and as one of the big winners at last month’s Golden Globes. But a key figure on a previous adaptation of the book does not quite understand the appeal of the recent version.

Jerry London, who directed the nine-hour Shogun that aired on NBC in September 1980, remembers his project as challenging, and says that producers initially pushed for a director of Japanese descent. “I had to convince them that I knew what I was doing,” London tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So after about a month or so, they accepted me and everything went well. But it was a very difficult show to do, and it turned out great.”

The director emphasizes that the new version felt much different from what he tried to accomplish with his miniseries, which he aimed to make as accessible as possible for Western audiences. The new version, he says, “is not entertaining for an American audience.”

Based on James Clavell’s best-selling 1975 novel, the original five-episode project starred Richard Chamberlain as English navigator John Blackthorne as he dealt with political concerns involving Lord Toranaga (Toshiro Mifune) and romantic feelings for Mariko (Yoko Shimada), who taught him Japanese culture. In addition to being a ratings smash, it was also critically acclaimed and earned 14 Emmy nominations, including a win for best limited series, along with nabbing the Golden Globe Award for best television drama.

“It’s completely different from the one I did,” London says about last year’s version. “Mine was based on the love story of Shogun between Blackthorne and Mariko, and this new one is based on Japanese history, and it’s more about Toranaga, who was the Shogun. It’s very technical and very difficult for an American audience to get their grips into it. I’ve talked to many people that have watched it, and they said, ‘I had to turn it off because I don’t understand it.’ So the filmmakers of the new one really didn’t care about the American audience.”

He continues, “They made it basically for Japan, and I was happy about it because I didn’t want my show to be copied. I think I did such a great job, and it won so many accolades, that I didn’t want them to copy it, which they didn’t do. But the new one is funny because everybody I talked to said, ‘I don’t understand it. What’s it all about?’ I watched the whole thing. It’s very difficult to stick with. It won all the [Emmy] awards because there were no big shows against it. There was not too much competition.”

There’s no question that Emmy voters were wowed by the recent FX adaptation, as it set the record for most wins in a single season with 18 and also became the first Japanese-language series to win the trophy for best drama series. The newer Shogun premiered on Feb. 27, 2024, and has been renewed for two more seasons. Season one starred Cosmo Jarvis as Blackthorne, Hiroyuki Sanada as Lord Toranaga and Anna Sawai as Mariko.

In his review of the first season of FX’s Shogun, THR’s chief television critic Daniel Fienberg wrote, “The resulting series is big, bold and beautiful, but maybe just a bit bloodless. On the page and surely in the 1980 Richard Chamberlain miniseries, Shogun put history and romance on generally equal footing, but this Shogun finds much more traction as an ambitious game of political chess. The balance of Machiavellian machinations and well-executed action is consistently gripping, while the central love story is too truncated to make much of an emotional dent.”

London, also known for directing such popular TV projects as The Brady Bunch, The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, says he would have liked the success of his Shogun to have been part of the conversations about the recent series.

“It was disappointing,” he says. “There wasn’t too much said about mine. Also, the new one has basically just one British actor [Jarvis] in it, and frankly, he didn’t have the charisma that Richard Chamberlain had.”