When Shōgun begins, Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) states that he doesn’t seek to gain power. Of course, he’s lying—but like every great leader, he knows that it’s more important to earn respect than it is to rule by fear. Toranaga’s goal throughout FX’s ten-episode limited series is to put his family in power for generations to come. So there’s reason to think that Shōgun will earn a second season, right?
Well, as many history buffs already know, the character of Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, who ruled Japan in the seventeenth century. His rise to the shogunate kick-started a generational reign of more than 250 years, but it took one of the nation’s bloodiest battles, at Sekigahara, to place him on top. Tokugawa was also a cunning politician whose real-life chess maneuvers are mostly depicted on Shōgun exactly as they occurred in Japanese history. Though the show’s Tokugawa counterpart is in a bit of a pickle at the end of episode 8, the mystery for audiences lies not in if he’ll solve the problem but in how he’ll solve it. We won’t spoil the ending here, but the events of the penultimate episode will surely send a shock to viewers at home.
Shōgun is also based on James Clavell’s 1975 novel of the same name, which has a definitive ending that the FX series is currently racing toward. The author wrote many more novels after Shōgun as part of his “Asian Saga,” but none of the stories return to the same characters from Shōgun. Suffice to say, we likely won’t see any more episodes after its series finale.
“We took the story to the end of the book and put a period at the end of that sentence,” co-creator Justin Marks, who partnered with wife Rachel Kondo on the project, told The Hollywood Reporter in March. “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 ten cars and closes up shop. It’s a bummer."
Marks also confirmed that Shōgun was filmed so long ago—due to production delays caused by Covid-19—that if FX had planned a second season of the series, we would know by now. “We wouldn’t just be in the writers room already,” he joked. “We’d be on set shooting season 2.”
Blackstone Publishing Shōgun, Part One (The Asian Saga)
