Will 'Shōgun' Get a Season Two?
Like many limited series before it, Shōgun, FX’s epic series set in 17th-century Japan, was originally intended to be just a single season. But as Shōgun’s 10th and final episode, “A Dream of a Dream,” streams on FX, fans are wondering whether there’s any hope for the buzzy series starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai, and Cosmo Jarvis to return for another season.
Extending Shōgun might be a tricky prospect. Based on the 1975 novel of the same name by James Clavell, Shōgun tells the tale of English sailor John Blackthorne (Jarvis) who winds up shipwrecked in feudal Japan as fictional Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Sanada) is at war with dangerous political rivals. In a February interview with The Direct, coshowrunner Justin Marks said that Shōgun season one ends “exactly where the book ends” and that he and coshowruner Rachel Kondo “tell the complete story of the book” with the season.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last month, Marks also noted the “long tail of postproduction” on the series, revealing that the first season was shot years ago. “It’s not like a normal TV series, where if we were in a situation like this promoting it, we wouldn’t just be in the writers room already, we’d be on set shooting season two by now,” he said.
That doesn’t mean another season is impossible, though. Clavell wrote six books in his Asian Saga series, including Shōgun, the third novel in his series. All of the novels in Clavell’s nonlinear sequence center on Europeans in Asia, with each book taking place in a different decade or century and set in a different location, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Iran. The fourth book, 1981’s Noble House, takes place in Hong Kong in 1963—quite a big jump from Japan in the year 1600.
Chronologically speaking, the follow-up to Shōgun would be Tai-Pan, the second novel in Clavell’s in the series, set in Hong Kong in 1841 at the tail end of the Opium War. But if Marks and Kondo wanted to continue exploring historical Japan, they have another option: Gai-Jin, the last novel in Clavell’s series, which follows two Europeans exploring the political landscape of Japan in 1862. Either way, if Marks and Kondo were to do another season of Shōgun based on Clavell’s body of work, they might take a spin at it White Lotus style, with a new cast and location.
Michaela Clavell, James Clavell’s daughter and an executive producer on Shōgun, told The Direct that extending Shōgun depends on the audience’s response to the series. “The audience will let us know whether there’s [an] appetite for that,” she said. “We shall see. It’s a great question. I wish I knew the complete answer, but I don’t.”
FX has not yet announced whether Shōgun has been renewed for a second season. But given its critical praise and commercial popularity—the series beat season two of The Bear as the most watched Hulu premiere—it’s clear that audiences are hankering for more.
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