Spoilers for Shōgun season 1 forward.
Since the electrifying conclusion of FX’s hit restricted collection Shōgun, questions on a possible second season have lingered—and now intensified—with a brand new report that star and producer Hiroyuki Sanada has signed on to reprise his position as Lord Yoshii Toranaga.
According to Deadline, Sanada has agreed to return to the present, through which his character battles to turn out to be a army dictator in Seventeenth-century Japan. But sources inform the publication that “other elements are still being worked out and deals are being finalized” in an effort to increase Shōgun, which was solely meant to final a single season. Making such a transfer would throw a compelling wrench into this 12 months’s Emmys race, with the present probably competing as a drama relatively than a restricted collection. Vanity Fair has reached out to reps for FX for remark.
Adapted from the 1975 James Clavell novel by co-creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, Shōgun has been a runaway hit since its February debut. “Ultimately, the audience gets to decide whether it’s something they want,” FX CEO John Landgraf beforehand instructed The Hollywood Reporter, including {that a} follow-up must be “big and detailed as well as really deep in terms of character and the human condition.” Given its crucial acclaim and business recognition—the collection beat season two of The Bear because the most-watched Hulu premiere ever—it’s clear that urge for food for the present is excessive.
Ahead, a have a look at the whole lot we all know—and have but to study—a few potential second season of Shōgun.
Who will return for season 2 of Shōgun?
So far, solely Sanada’s identify has been talked about in reviews a few attainable return to the collection. As the actor beforehand instructed Vanity Fair, “The novel’s events finish with our [finale], episode 10. If they want to make something more, it’s going to be totally original. Who knows? The model of Shōgun makes it easy to see what happened in real life, and then we can create an original story from then. Who knows? We have history.”
While Sanada has left the door open for a reprisal, the longer term is much less clear for different characters, together with Cosmo Jarvis’s Jack Blackthorne. He beforehand instructed VF about how troublesome it was to depart the position behind on the finish of filming for season one. “Blackthorne totally preoccupied and consumed me, and had for so long,” he stated. “When it came to the final shot, it was just horrific, because it’s only then that I suppose Blackthorne had to be left behind and all of these adventures had to be left behind. And it was just kind of sad, you know? I suppose in a way it was relieving, but also, then you’re just another unemployed actor, and you don’t know what’s going to come next.”
There are at the very least a couple of beloved characters who is not going to return, so long as the second season follows a linear format. Tadanobu Asano’s Yabushige, who’s sentenced to commit seppuku, a noble type of taking one’s personal life, by Lord Toranaga within the finale. In the season’s penultimate episode, it’s Anna Sawai’s Lady Mariko who meets her demise in an act of comparable sacrifice.
What will season 2 of Shōgun be about?
Marks confirmed early on that the primary season of Shōgun would conclude “exactly where the book ends” and that he and Kondo “tell the complete story of the book” inside its 10 episodes. But Clavell did write six books in his Asian Saga, together with Shōgun, the third novel in his collection. Each installment within the nonlinear sequence explores Europeans in Asia, with every centering on a unique time interval and placement, spanning from Hong Kong to Iran.
If the creators have been considering purely chronologically, the subsequent chapter of Shōgun could be Tai-Pan, the second novel in Clavell’s collection, set in 1841 Hong Kong on the final gaps of the Opium War. Sanada’s potential involvement actually means that at the very least his character would nonetheless be current in one other iteration—even when the remainder of the story assumed extra of an anthology really feel.
When does Shōgun season 2 come out?
Given {that a} renewal is only speculative at this level, there’s no agency launch date to share. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter final month, Marks famous the “long tail of postproduction” on the present, which may extend the ready interval earlier than a follow-up. “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,” he defined. “We’d be on set shooting season two by now.”
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