AFTER TEN EPISODES of Machiavellian plotting, incredible filmmaking and production design, and, at times, visceral violence, FX’s Shōgun has come to a conclusion. Billed all along as a limited series that would cover the entirety of author James Clavell’s bestselling 1975 doorstopper of the same name, the show premiered to universally glowing reviews and kept the same energy for its entire two-and-a-half-month run airing on FX and streaming on Hulu. While there’s plenty of competition in the earlygoing (think Prime Video’s Fallout, Netflix’s Ripley, and HBO’s The Sympathizer, among others) a consensus seems to have formed that Shōgun is the best of 2024 so far—and will likely be hard to top. Its record-setting 25 Emmy nominations certainly help to hammer that point home.
When a show is that universally successful and loved, though, it’s only natural that people will want more. Game of Thrones ended its epic run with something of a whimper, and while the rumors of a Jon Snow-based sequel series haven’t yet come to fruition, several spinoffs, led by House of the Dragon, are under construction in Westeros. HBO’s Big Little Lies was originally viewed as a pure limited series, its award-winning first season covering the entirety of Liane Moriarty’s novel; the show was such a success, though, that it returned for a second go-around (adding Meryl Streep to its cast), and there’s been some recent chatter that a third season could soon officially be in the works.
So where does that leave Shōgun? The show was always planned as a limited event, and this adaption has accomplished that in an incredibly successful manner. But success is success, and good ratings and lots of fans generally tends to mean… lots of money. If there’s a way to do a second season of Shōgun, FX will likely be on board.
But what form could that take—if any at all?
Will there be a Season 2 of Shōgun?
It was announced earlier in the year that Shōgun will officially be returning for both season 2 and season 3. The first season of the show covers the entirety of the novel its based upon, but there have been ways around that for other shows in the past, as detailed above.
Previously, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Shōgun co-creators (and husband-and-wife team) Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo expressed some trepidation with going off the roadmap that Clavell’s novel set them on, but wouldn’t explicitly rule anything out. “I think if we had a story, if we could find a story, we would be open to it,” Marks said.
The same THR piece also raised the suggestion that Shōgun could continue on as an anthology series, similar to its FX siblings Fargo and American Horror Story. Marks reacted with excitement, noting that he was in the midst of reading one of Clavell’s other “Asian Saga” books. “I can only speak for myself reading Tai-Pan right now, just apropos of nothing, honestly, and what a great book,” he said. “I’ve been telling Rachel about it as I’ve been reading it and saying, ‘Well! He did it again.’ But it’s completely different.”
Finally, there’s the possibility that a hypothetical future season of Shōgun could simply take inspiration from another epic story from Japanese history, and not necessarily one from a work of James Clavell literature. “[Actor Cosmo Jarvis, who plays Blackthorne] said something about how as he was doing this show, he became a student of Japanese history, and there is a lot of it. And that was his answer,” Kondo said. “It is a good answer.”
There are lots of possibilities, and potential options for more Shōgun, should the parties involved have interest. But if it simply lives as of of recent history’s great single-season television projects, safe to say that would be OK too; there are plenty more great shows with similar themes that you can comfortably sink your attention into.
