Shogun
FX
There isn’t going to be one. Yeah, that’s the gist of it, but now those behind the show are explaining why there’s not going to be a season 2 of Shogun.
You might think that due to the massive popularity of the show, it may try to reach beyond its “limited series” ambitions and produce further seasons. It would certainly not be the first time we’ve seen this happened with a popular supposed miniseries. But Shogun? No, they’re not doing it, which would require them to go beyond the source material of the original book.
Here’s producer and co-creator Justin Marks on the idea of a second season, speaking to THR:
“We took the story to the end of the book and put a period at the end of that sentence. We love how the book ends; it was one of the reasons why we both knew we wanted to do it — and we ended in exactly that place. And I’ve been party to this in the past with shows like this, where you build a whole factory, and it only pumps out 10 cars and closes up shop. It’s a bummer.”
Shogun
Hulu
He goes on to say they wrote a 900-page instruction manual for how they made the show based on the 1000-page book, including loads of information on how to properly depict feudal Japan, and he hoped someone else could use it as a production primer in the future.
There is a bit of a catch here. There may not be a Shogun season 2, but James Clavell wrote six total books in his “Asian Saga” between 1962 and 1993. There are five more set in five different time periods spanning Japan, Hong Kong and Iran. The next book would be Tai-Pan, set in Hong Kong in 1841 taking place after the end of the first Opium War. In short, it would be an entirely different production than Shogun. No returning cast, and entirely new era of learn about and study.
Given that the current Shogun team has been working on Shogun specifically since 2018, it seems unlikely they would just dive into another book like this. I mean, it’s possible, but given what they’re talking about here in terms of how much they prepared to adapt Shogun, it does seem unlikely. And if they did do this, it wouldn’t really be Shogun season 2 anyway, it’s an entirely different series, and would not arrive for years.
I mean, I get it. I also would not want to extend Shogun beyond a fifty-year-old book that’s already been written, especially if you have adapted the full ending for this ten episode miniseries as a hard stopping point. I think ten episodes should be satisfying enough, and not everything popular needs to be twisted into getting more, usually worse, seasons.
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