Shōgun Bosses Hint at Their Plan for Future Seasons: ‘We Know How All of This Ends’

Shōgun‘s story will continue — and the people behind it have an idea where it goes from here.

FX announced last month that it was developing more seasons of the samurai epic, and co-showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo tell our sister site Variety that they’ve already met with FX president Gina Balian and executive producer Michaela Clavell — the daughter of Shōgun book author James Clavell — and “presented the first kernels of, ‘We’re not sure we should do this, but if we did, here’s how we thought it might start.’ And we gave them that scene, and we felt them go like this — and it felt really good!”

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Shōgun’s 10-episode freshman season earned strong critical acclaim, but “there were a lot of questions that we felt were still unanswered in the story,” Marks admits. In fact, the finale didn’t actually show us Hiroyuki Sanada’s Lord Toranaga becoming the ruler of Japan, or shōgun: “The title character doesn’t become the title character.” But as he notes, the first season covers the entirety of Clavell’s book, so “there are no roads where we’re going.”

To look ahead, Marks and Kondo consulted one of the show’s historical advisors about what happened to the real-life people who inspired Clavell’s novel, and they began “really just building that together into a shape that started to feel like, ‘Oh, I think we have to do this. I think we really love this idea.'” Most exciting of all, they already have an ending for the series in mind, Marks reveals: “We know how all of this ends in the final moment. And once we saw that moment, we said, ‘Oh, now we have to get to that. Now we have to do that.’… We think we have something that is exciting and surprising.”

Along the way, Marks and Kondo batted around a lot of fun ideas with the other writers about where the story could go from here — including a buddy comedy centered on the odd couple of English sailor Blackthorne and Japanese warlord Yabushige. Marks describes the idea as “some fantastic alt-history where Blackthorne brings Yabushige back to London, and the two of them kind of go into this place. I mean, it would be wild.”

What are you hoping to see in future seasons of Shōgun? Drop your thoughts in a comment below.

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