Shōgun is here for a good time, not for a long time, creators say
"We took the story to the end of the book and put a period at the end of that sentence," creator Justin Marks said, not saving anything for a Season 2
Aux News Shōgun
FX’s adaptation of Shōgun is pretty unquestionably the TV show of the moment, at the moment, with the Hiroyuki Sanada-starring adaptation of James Clavell’s classic historical novel earning both big ratings, and hefty critical buzz, after the release of its first three episodes over the last few weeks. But don’t let yourself get too settled in to its world of 17th century feudal Japan, Shōgun heads: Series creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks have made it clear that they’re here for a good time, not for a long time, as far as a potential second season is concerned.
This is per a long, wide-ranging interview Kondo and Marks gave to THR this week, which explored all manner of facets of the show’s long production—including the fact that its first season will end at the same point as Clavell’s book. “We took the story to the end of the book and put a period at the end of that sentence,” Marks said. “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.”
The duo—who are married, and who employ a lot of “new baby” language talk when discussing the series—do acknowledge that it’s kind of a “bummer” to “build a whole factory, and it only pumps out 10 cars and closes up shop,” citing the fact that they and their crew have gotten really, genuinely good at making the TV show Shōgun over the last few years. They also don’t outright say “no season 2, ever,” because, c’mon, this is TV—someone is always going to pitch another season of something successful, even if they have to acquire, adapt, or outright commission different source material to do it.
Shōgun’s 10-episode first (only?) season is set to wrap up on April 23.
26 Comments
IIRC, Clavell wrote 6 or 7 books about feudal Asian cultures. But I’m not sure how closely related they were.
I don’t think there’s any crossover between them, and they often had large gaps between them, both geographically and chronologically.
Some of the stuff in his back catalog is worth adapting, though. I still think about King Rat, which is a very small book for him, but excellent. It’s probably only movie-length, though.
There is crossover. The same family is featured through out each of the ones I read. Just later in time.
Whoops, just looked it up. Yeah, it looks like the family from Tai-Pan shows up in four of his six books. Neat!
That’s more of an Easter egg than a connection — he often tried to put in an ancestor of his WWII character Peter Marlowe (who was loosely based on Clavell himself) but they generally didn’t play a major role in the plot.
this film adaption from 1965 is excellent: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059358/do you think we need another one?
It was adapted in the mid 60s, with George Segal. It’s a good film.
An adaptation 60 years ago isn’t necessarily a reason not to do a new take on it. Shogun was huge in the 1980s and that didn’t stop them from making this series now.
King Rat is also the most personal book for him because it deals with POWs in Japanese camps in WWII and Clavell was such a POW. It’s interesting that Clavell maintained an interest in and respect for the Japanese after that experience. My father’s uncle also was a POW in a Japanese camp and retained a grudge against them his whole life, refusing to buy Japanese cars and other products.
King Rat’s been done, in the early 70s. George Segal I wanna say? Never seen it tho. LOL, guess I should have scrolled down.
They’re all in the same series, with some characters being descendants of others and a few having cameos in other stories. I imagine we’ll probably see an adaptation of Shogun’s distant sequel Gai-Jin, which is set 250 years later, but likely not the others.
Tai-Pan and Noble House are set in colonial Hong Kong, so the Chinese embassy would raise hell if they were filmed, Whirlwind is set during the Iranian revolution and involves so many helicopters and mountain settings it would be too expensive to make even if the book weren’t often boring, and King Rat’s short length makes it more suited to a movie.
Ah yes, just the show to put on when you’re wanting a “good time”..A tragedy set in feudal Japan.
Good. More shows should take this tact. Quality over quantity. An alternative would be something like a “theater troupe” model where you have the same showrunner and writers each season and even the same cast but the onscreen talent is swapping roles to tell a new story every “season”.
American Horror Story has been doing that for 12 yrs.
exactly!
Except for the quality over quantity part. Quantity always wins.
MIRACLE WORKERS, too, I believe.
Shogun is inspired by a real person and actually hews reasonably closely to what happened to him. The book Samurai William by Giles Milton tells his tale and it’s an absolute cracker. If you’ve read Shogun and seen the TV show, this is what to read next.
It really doesn’t hew reasonably closely at all, it takes a few facts and spins hundreds of pages of pulp around them.
GOOD. Not every show needs 5 seasons. Miniseries are great and we need more of them.
I miss the miniseries. Roots was fantastic with eight episodes.
So did they include the scene where Anjin-San gets his back pissed on?
yes they did in fact
just do King Rat or Tai-Pan next.and please, hasn’t Handmaid’s Tale taught us anything about extra seasons that go beyond the original book?
It seems, no one watched the miniseries from the 80s or read the book. It had a very definitive ending. And yes, Clavell wrote more books, but as far as I remember they had nothing to do with Blackthorne. Tai-Pan was adapted with a (supposedly terrible) movie with Bryan Brown, Noble House got his own miniseries with Pierce Brosnan.
It’s been decades since I either read it or watch the mini but I remember really enjoying Noble House.