Shōgun Is Reinventing the TV Epic

Last fall, I made a classroom full of 20-year-olds read The Da Vinci Code. It was a seminar for junior American culture studies majors, and one of the themes was to focus on cultural texts from the year 2003, the year when most of them were born. We read The Da Vinci Code because it was the bestselling book of that year, it provoked months of controversy and obsession, and it was spun off into a series of blockbuster movies. It was a big deal! As the novel was quite literally “before their time,” I doubted they would have read it already, but I assumed there’d be some degree of familiarity. (One assignment was that they had to take the book home over Thanksgiving break, read it conspicuously in front of any millennial or Gen X people in their lives, and report back.) Turns out, barely any of the students in my class had even heard of it.