Fans and critics have praised FX’s Shōgun as the best new TV series of 2024, surpassing HBO’s Game of Thrones in terms of drama, intrigue, and action.
Shōgun may not be a huge franchise starter for FX or Hulu, despite popular belief. The showrunners of Shōgun say a Season 2 order is improbable.
While Shōgun continues to gain popularity, it’s possible that some viewers are unaware it’s based on a novel. James Clavell’s Shōgun book (1975) was a literary cult classic long before Shōgun (2024) aired, and even generated a cult-classic series in 1980 that was a hit.
While Shōgun continues to gain popularity, it’s possible that some viewers are unaware it’s based on a novel. James Clavell’s Shōgun novel was a literary cult classic long before Shōgun (2024) aired. It even generated a cult-classic TV limited series in 1980, which was also a cult-hit.
The creators of Shōgun (2024) were clear from the outset of production that the limited series was exactly that (a limited series), and that the ten episodes of the series would cover the events in Clavell’s original novel. While Shōgun’s success may lead viewers to expect a second season, it was always intended to be a one-season series.
From the showruners:
“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,” Marks explained to THR, later adding that “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.”
While that does seem to settle the question of Shōgun Season 2 for good, Marks did admit that it’s not a reality that he’s entirely happy with, given the extensive work that went into the pre-production and filming of this series:
“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. You know, one of our producers wrote a nearly 900-page instruction manual for how we do this show — almost as long as the book Shogun itself. All of this infrastructural knowledge went into it. I just hope someone else — maybe a friend — needs a production primer on feudal Japan at some point, so I can be like, “Here you go, use this book. That will save you 11 months.”
