Shogun concludes with slow burn Season 1 with no news of renewal

The Shogun series concluded with a slow-burn Season 1, with no news of the renewal.

Fans might have been anticipating seeing Lord Toronaga attacking Osaka to avenge the death of his vessel lady Mariko, but, that’s not the case.

FX Network’s Shōgun, a historical drama based on the bestselling novel by author James Clavell, has met with its end with the 10 episodes that aired on April 23, Tuesday.

 

A fictionalized version of history, the book was also adapted into the 1980 miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain. Shōgun is set at the end of the Sengoku Period (1467-1600) during the dawn of a looming civil war in feudal Japan.

Despite the show’s massive success, it will likely not receive a Season 2 renewal. Co-creator and showrunner Justin Marks told The Direct earlier in February that Season 1 concludes “exactly where the book ends.”

“I think we tell the complete story of the book. And we get to the end. I hope those who have read the book will see it’s exactly where the book ends,” Marks explained.

“And we are really excited about that because it’s a very surprising ending that [James] Clavell does for the book. And it’s kind of beautifully ambiguous in certain senses. But you know, that’s the stories we tell it. I will also say it took us five years. This show is older than both of our children. You know, it’s a lot.”

Later in March, Marks shared a similar statement about Season 2 in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

“We took the story to the end of the book and put a period at the end of that sentence,” he 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.”

He added that Shogun is 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.”

To see the rise of Toronaga, who founded the first Edo shogunate, would have made for an epic hour of television. But the series concludes just here wrapping up the stories of all main characters.

To read the overview of the Shugan series, keep following this space.