The First Shōgun Is So Back (on an Official Streaming Site)

This story was originally published on April 3 and has been updated with new reporting.

Update, Wednesday, May 29: Nearly two months later and after FX and Hulu’s Shōgun wrapped its first season, Paramount Global made the 1980 adaptation of Shōgun available for streaming on Paramount+ on May 22. Just like the original broadcast, the Paramount+ version is divided into six episodes, instead of the edits produced for its various home-media releases over the years. Paramount+ confirmed that it will have the show through the end of the year. Enjoy! And you’re welcome.

The original story published on April 3 follows.

FX and Hulu’s yelling-heavy adaptation of James Clavell’s novel Shōgun is one of this season’s most exciting debuts. The show tosses samurai action, Japanese court intrigue, and religious conflict into its compulsively watchable cultural soup and chases the mixture with sake and earthquakes. But Shōgun 2024 is actually the book’s second spin on TV. The first was a five-episode miniseries produced by Paramount Television that aired on NBC in 1980. However, if you want to stream the vintage adaptation, starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune, you may need to do some sleuthing: It’s not available to legally stream anywhere or rent or buy digitally on VOD. How could this be? We asked an army of licensing executives and company spokespeople to find out.

Buf first, let’s get this out of the way: Shōgun is technically available to stream somewhere. It’s not on any official channels but is available on the Internet Archive, the nonprofit and digital library known for cataloguing lost media — from obscure anime dubs to dearly departed websites. The Internet Archive has a couple versions of Shōgun 1980 — both a four-part version that was released on DVD in 2003 and a partial rip of the 2014 HD-remastered Blu-ray release, which spread the miniseries across three discs. (Those files’ 1080p quality is way better, but only video from the first two discs appears to have made it to the Archive; the link for part three has no video — not ideal.) There’s also some debate in the Internet Archive comments and on Reddit over whether that four-part version is in fact the complete and uncut Shōgun; the Blu-ray release I picked up has a running time of nine hours and nine minutes, while the four-parter’s time stamps add up to 22 and a half minutes short of that.

Still, the show’s absence from any of the major streaming outlets seems bizarre. What is Paramount, whose parent company holds the license, thinking? Shōgun 1980 is neither an obscurity nor an example of lost media. The show represented the prestige TV of its time — it was made for $22 million ($69 million in modern-day dollars), aired to an audience of 25 million, and starred bona fide movie stars in Chamberlain and Mifune. It won Paramount and NBC a Peabody, a pair of Emmys, and the Golden Globes for Best Television Series (Drama), Actor, and Actress after its television debut, and it broke taboos with portrayals of beheading, nudity, and disciplinary urination. (If Cosmo Jarvis getting pissed on shocked you a month ago, imagine watching the same scene on a network at 8 p.m. in 1980.) They even turned it into a computer game. And the miniseries never really disappeared, either. Today, Shōgun’s 2014 Blu-ray is still in print and up on Amazon for $27 — released under Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment.

So why isn’t it on streaming? Representatives for FX and Hulu’s new Shōgun, for their part, made it clear their show had nothing to do with the old one’s absence from streaming. “Ours is an original adaptation of the book with zero connection to the miniseries,” an FX spokesperson said, denying that there was any contractual reason the new show’s release would bar the old one’s distribution. Meanwhile, sources at NBC confirmed their network just aired the 1980 show and had no claim on its distribution today, punting questions related to the 1980 miniseries to the company that produced it.

Which brings us back to Paramount. The company declined to comment on why Shōgun 1980 isn’t streaming, but the answer may be tangled in the company’s spiderweb history of mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations. (Two years ago, it was called ViacomCBS.) Many of the shows produced by Paramount Television later moved under the ownership of its sister company, CBS, and Shōgun’s licensing today is overseen by Paramount Global Content Distribution. It’s not as if it’s completely lost to time — as is the case with shows like Murphy Brown, which has so many music rights to negotiate that there’s little hope of seeing it again. Shōgun, Vulture has learned, is currently licensed in select territories internationally. And sources at Paramount also tell us that it’s currently available to be licensed in the U.S.

In other words, there’s nothing stopping Netflix, Hulu, or even PGCD’s own corporate sibling Paramount+ from paying a license fee and offering it to subscribers. Or if the SVOD players don’t think Shōgun is worth the cash, PGCD could put the show on a FAST platform — Tubi, Freevee, or its other sibling, Pluto TV — and just make money from ad sales on the title. Licensing decisions can be made for a number of reasons, but after more than a week of asking multiple employees at three major media companies why a 44-year-old show wasn’t streaming and getting no clear answer, I began to wonder: Did anyone at Paramount really care that they owned Shōgun? Given all the hoopla around FX’s Shōgun adaptation, why wouldn’t someone at Paramount+ decide to carry its own adaptation to capitalize on the buzz? Could a clause in some dusty old contract somehow make it more expensive to put on streaming than the average show? Could they have seen putting the old miniseries on Paramount+ as doing free marketing for FX and Hulu’s parent company, Disney?

Of course, this isn’t a particularly unusual situation in the streaming age. Too many shows like Shōgun live in licensing purgatory — un-streamable despite the fact that their parent company owns them outright. Over the last couple years, several streaming services — most visibly Max, Disney+, and Hulu — have decided that the cost of platforming too many old library titles was just too high, given the residuals that would have to be paid out, music rights, or other factors. Paramount+ itself removed a slate of Nickelodeon shows just last week. Audiences today can’t enjoy hit shows like Thirtysomething or Homicide: Life on the Street without resorting to extralegal downloads or shelling out for exorbitantly pricey, out-of-print, or incomplete DVD sets.

But when it comes to Shōgun, it’s a missed opportunity to recirculate a classic, if dated, telling of Clavell’s story. Paramount Global could certainly release that remastered version digitally on either Paramount+ or any VOD platform and bill it as “the award-winning original.” Doing so could showcase it to a new audience, lay the commentariat’s questions to rest, and jab at its streaming competitors at FX and Hulu with some counterprogramming. Streaming fights are fun, after all! NBCUniversal’s Peacock licensed the more faithful adaptation of 3 Body Problem a few weeks before Netflix dropped its own in March — why can’t we have dueling Shōguns?

My approach was far from scientific, but as a test, I started playing both the Blu-ray’s first disc and the Internet Archive’s first file at the exact same time. Within five minutes, the content on the latter began outpacing the former. I’m not sure exactly what’s been added or lengthened, but in my opinion, seeing the shoddy DVD rip made my teeth grind after watching the comparative richness of the Blu-ray’s visuals.