‘Pachinko’ Showrunner on Expanding the Book’s World — and Whether Those ‘Shōgun’ Emmys Changed the Race

The Television Academy’s 2022 “Pachinko” snub is infamous around these parts.

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Soo Hugh’s sweeping generational drama — based on the novel by Min Jin Lee — is easily one of the best TV shows of the decade. It’s won plenty of awards, including a Critic’s Choice Award and a Peabody, yet Season 1 was all but shut out of the Emmys.

But that was before “Shogun.”

“Pachinko” would have been nominated against Emmy favorites “Ozark,” “Better Call Saul,” “Stranger Things,” and “Succession,” — good shows in their own right, but lacking in diversity — none of which competed with “Shōgun” and paved the way for non-English winner with a majority-Japanese cast (to Emmys’ credit, “Squid Game” got a 2022 nomination, but there really was no beating those damn Roys).

“‘Shōgun’ was such an incredible show,” Hugh said in an interview with IndieWire. “I’m happy with that comparison. Obviously Anna (Sawai) was in both shows and her performance was just glorious. The more shows we have that tell stories of people that we’re not so familiar with, the bigger our own world comes.”

Season 2 of “Pachinko” continues a tradition of excellence , telling the parallel stories of the Baek family in the 1940s and in 1989 and expanding the world of its own story. Sunja’s (Min-ha Kim) sons grow from children into teenagers, interact with her former love Koh Hansu (Minho Lee), and the family leaves Osaka to escape the bombing of Nagasaki.

“It’s funny to think of Season 1 as small — it didn’t feel small then — but we have so many more characters,” Hugh said. “The kids are growing up and we wanted to get involved in their lives. All of a sudden, Season 2 became this juggling act of storylines, and some of the storylines converged and some didn’t. It took a lot of time to weave the different scenes in and figure out who we need to trim back and who we had more space to give.”

From a writing to filming to editing, that scope challenged Hugh to maintain perspective as a storyteller, and sometimes kill her darlings in service of the wider season. One deleted scene involved Etsuko (Kaho Minami), who shared a scene with Solomon (Jin Ha) in the 1980s timeline. The Episode 1 scene would have been Minami’s only appearance all season, and didn’t make the final cut.

“The pacing of it just, we just couldn’t quite figure it out,” Hugh recalled. “We spend a few weeks on in the edit room, and we realized that even though it was this amazing scene, it sort of stepped on the scene Soloman has later with Sunja (Yuh-jung Youn) in the Pachinko parlor. Once we realized that, we had to cut the Etsuko scene, and the episode just breathed again and moved — even though the scene itself is incredible. Those kind of choices were hard.”

There’s also a lot less of Sunja’s husband Isak (Steve Sang-Hyun Noh), who is thrown into prison at the end of Season 1 and makes a brief return in Season 2. Noh prepared for his character’s sendoff by talking to a doctor about what sepsis does to the body, a process which Hugh said had him “a little traumatized” — and the performance still brings her to tears.

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Hugh initially had a different opening for the season, but changed it because of a note from Apple. Her version of 201 started with Noa and Mozasu at school, but executives wanted to go bigger. “That’s, that’s too television, right?” Hugh recalled thinking, but the intention was to grab the audience immediately. She moved up the scene of Hansu’s return to Osaka — with hesitation at first — and felt an immediate structural shift.

“The minute I moved it in the script, I was like, ‘Oh, this works so much better. It feels cinematic. It feels just like our show.'”

As the past continues to unfold, Sunja’s sons had to grow up, which meant a season full of child and teen actors on set. Hugh said she was nervous about startling the audience with casting changes, especially if the two versions of Noa (Tae Joo Kang and Kang-hoon Kim) and Mozasu (Eunseong Kwon and Mansaku Takada) look enough alike.

“Both the young actors and the older actors who played Noa and Mozasu are just so good, once I saw them on set, I stopped worrying about it,” she said. “And there’s something about having children on set that is so much fun. Especially sometimes when you’re doing a heavier scene… they just bring life into it a different way.”

Just as Season 1 saw Sunja moving from Busan to Osaka, Season 2 sees the family leave the city and seek refuge in Japan’s rice fields while awaiting the end of World War II.

“It was a trek to get there,” Hugh said. “There was a moment when we were switching hotels every night in Korea through going from city to city to city to city to shoot. And that was what was nice where we shot the rice fields is we were able to bunker there for just a little bit longer, for a few weeks. It’s beautiful. It’s only two episodes, but even just the filming of it was so much fun. Everyone relaxed. It was really hot, and there were a lot of storms, so there’s some stress in figuring that out, but it almost felt like this mini vacation within the within the schedule, which was nice.”

It’s been two-and-a-half years since “Pachinko” first premiered, and five years since Hugh started work on it, but she’s still amazed at the level of dedication and talent every member of her team brings to the job.

“There’s something so gratifying to work with people who are working on that level,” she said. “What’s really amazing about ‘Pachinko’ is everyone wants to be good enough for this because they care so much about the characters. So many times, the cast and crew have said, ‘I’ve never worked this hard on a show before.’ I would ask ‘Why do you think that is?’ A lot of people say ‘I don’t know,’ and then some people will say, ‘Because I actually care about them. I care about these people. They almost feel like real people to me, these characters.’ The best thing is that I got to work with people who actually cared about what we made, and you don’t always get that privilege.”

“Pachinko” is now streaming on Apple TV+.