Intro for May 21, 2024

Dear Gossips,   

Welcome back to those in Canada from the Victoria Day long weekend. And this coming weekend it’s a long weekend in the US, Memorial Day, so it’ll be interesting to see what surprises there are for us in gossip. 

After Memorial Day, Hollywood will be dialing up the Emmys intensity. Nominations voting will begin on June 13 which means the For Your Consideration events will be taking up a lot of space. For example, Disney’s two week FYC series will kick off on May 29 with Feud: Capote vs the Swans and conclude on June 11, just two days before nomination voting, with the show that many are anticipating to be the heavyweight of the year: Shōgun!

Shōgun’s two leads, Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai, are expected to be in attendance as the series has officially submitted in the Outstanding Drama category, instead of limited, and for a total of 40 nomination possibilities. Shōgun has been universally acclaimed, a critical and commercial smash hit, breaking streaming records, at one point “crushing Netflix in viewership”. One of the things that makes Shōgun remarkable, in addition to the fact that it’s largely subtitled, is that because it is subtitled, as Vulture pointed out, the audience was fully immersed. People watch television in the background much of the time these days. They watch with their phones in one hand. With Shōgun, though, you cannot be on TikTok at the same time, because so much of the “action” is in the dialogue. In the translations. In the deliberate way Mariko-sama chose to deliver, or not deliver, Anjin’s words. And that applies to all audiences because even for someone watching in Japan, they might understand the Japanese, but they too would have had to read the English subtitles to follow the dialogue in reverse. 

Sarah wrote in her review of Shōgun that the show does not talk down to its viewer, that it does not overexplain, that it trusts that people in these times will look up the historical references they’re not familiar with. But with the way the show was laid out, Shōgun also demanded and expected more from its viewer. The series did not accept that people can only consume content in 15 second bites. It asked of its viewer to pay attention – we did and we were rewarded with an outstanding story, one of the best shows of the streaming era. 

Some will say that this is an exception, and I hope it isn’t. I hope it’s a pendulum swing. I hope it’s a reaction against this push for shorter, faster, sometimes dumber. I hope it’s a sign that long-form, intense content that requires full engagement is still relevant. Even when it’s mostly talking… 

Because THAT too is what makes Shōgun so f-cking brilliant. Yes, it’s violent – these people love chopping heads off or slicing open their own bellies – but as previously mentioned, the “action” is in the words, in what people say or don’t say to each other. And HOW they say it. In Shōgun, the words are the weapons, and battles are fought in conversation. We didn’t need to see explosions, or fire blazing across our screens, or armies clashing on a battlefield to feel the stress and clench our fists with anticipation. 

A wall didn’t have to collapse to make us gasp out loud. The most gasp-out-loud moments in Shōgun happened with a single sentence. 

“I would sooner live a thousand years than die with you like this.” 

When Mariko-sama says this to Buntaro, it’s weighted with the same brutality as a knife to the eye. 

“So I sent a woman to do what an army never could.” 

If you know the show, I know you heard the roaring from your heart to your head the moment Toranaga-sama finished saying this – and you didn’t need the sight of a thousand soldiers to accompany it. 

The current record for the most nominations in a season is 32 by Game of Thrones. Can Shōgun break it? The industry and the audience will be better for it if it does. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey