(Photo: FX on Hulu)
Shogun is currently airing on Hulu, but some viewers are wondering if a second season is in the works. The show’s co-creators, Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, spoke about the possibility of another round of episodes in a recent interview with THR.
Starring Anna Sawai, Tadanobu Asano, Fumi Nikaido, Tokuma Nishioka, Takehiro Hira, Ako, Shinnosuke Abe, Yasunari Takeshima, Hiroto Kanai, Toshi Toda, Hiro Kanagawa, Nestor Carbonell, Yuki Kura, Tommy Bastow, Moeka Hoshi, Yoriko Doguchi, and Yuka Kouri, Shogun is set in 1600 feudal Japan and is based on the novel by James Clavell.
A second season is unlikely as the series creators feel they brought the story to a natural close. Marks said the following about the future of the FX series:
“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.”
That being said, if FX wants more of Shogun, there could be more. The couple has been working on the project since 2018 and Marks notes their response may be colored by the long hours it took to produce the first season,
“Oh, that’s just our bodies talking. Like, do you want to have another kid right now? (Laughs.) You know, we also made this show so long ago, because of the long tail of postproduction on it. 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.”
What do you think? Have you been watching this FX series? Would you like to see it continue, or is one self-contained season enough?