‘ShÅgun’ Shows How Specific Storytelling Is Great Storytelling
“Shōgun” had already broken the Emmy record for most awards for a single season of TV before the Primetime Emmy broadcast even started on September 15. Its success in netting 18 awards, including Outstanding Drama Series, has not only paved the way for additional seasons of the FX series but hopefully even more TV stories told with the same level of detail, rigor, and cultural care that “Shōgun” applied to its look into power politics of 17th-century Japan.
The Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (or CAPE) has been working tirelessly — if not scheming quite so relentlessly as Toranaga — to see exactly this kind of storytelling become the norm in Hollywood. The organization works with top series and films on sensitivity reading and cultural consulting, sponsors multiple fellowships for writers, directors, and executives, and also publishes the CAPE list in partnership with The Blacklist to showcase great stories featuring protagonists with Asian and/or Pacific Islander heritage.
“Shōgun” is just one of the series CAPE has consulted with, but according to executive director Michelle Sugihara, that partnership has been an ideal one because the series already had so many pieces in place to succeed.
“They are almost the model for what we like to see for consulting,” Sugihara told IndieWire. “They had Japanese people on the leadership side, which is very important, and they used many different consultants. So it’s not just like they hire one person and expect them to do everything. They had Japanese music consultants, hair consultants, period and samurai movement research — these are all very specific things, different expertises, and they brought all of that in.”
What Sugihara loves, among many other things about the series, is that the end result looks effortless. Part of what makes it great is that feeling of detail, specificity, and legitimacy that working with experts on a given cultural context can provide. But that work was fused with the work of making the show and not just an item on a checklist.
“They spent the money on it and they really did it carefully and, you know, kudos to Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks and the rest of the FX team. They were very intentional and very serious about what they were doing and it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we just did it and then we brought in a consultant to rubber stamp it,'” Sugihara said.
That’s the sort of approach that CAPE, in the course of its consulting work, has seen as leading to the best results and one that Sugihara would like to see more of. It’s something that is much more likely to happen, too, when the writers and decision-makers for a project about Asian or AAPI folks are Asian and AAPI themselves.
“Sometimes we’ll have someone who is outside the community write a project and then at the very end they’ll [want to] bring in someone; I’ll get a request for us to recommend a writer to come in and do a sensitivity pass. And I’m always challenging them a little. It’s like, ‘Well, why don’t you hire them earlier? On your next project, can we hire them from the beginning?’” Sugihara said. “That’s something we’ve been advocating for for a long time.”
It’s not just something CAPE has advocated for, though. It’s something they’re trying to change by mentoring writers and executives across seniority levels in film and TV. “When I started at CAPE, we had one fellowship, our New Writers fellowship, and today we have seven different programs and fellowships,” Sugihara said. “We have writers on over 70 shows on every major platform, streamers and networks. So that’s been incredible.”
CAPE’s fellowship alumni have worked on every genre and format of TV shows, from “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Pachinko” to “House of the Dragon” and “The Rings of Power.” Sugihara’s excited for the organization to branch out even further, into video games. “There’s a lot of narrative storytelling that happens in games; we’re talking to a bunch of those companies. A lot of these games need writers and voiceover actors, so there’s a lot of synergy there that I’m very excited about,” Sugihara said.
Whatever the story and whatever the medium, the earlier a project can bring in a partner like CAPE, the better. “A lot of time, something comes to us too late. And at that point, there’s very little we can do or it turns into more of a crisis management type situation or it gets more expensive because you need to go back and redo things. Whereas if you had come to us earlier, we could have been able to shepherd it more efficiently and cheaply,” Sugihara said. “Candidly, for ‘Shōgun,’ we really just helped with the promotion at the end. They did such a great job themselves.”
