FX’s award-devouring epic Shōgun is officially forging ahead with Season 2, and while Season 1 wrapped up the full story of the book, the creative team is ready to turn that page and write a brand-new chapter, and Cosmo Jarvis is back.
After racking up 18 Emmy wins including Lead Actor for Hiroyuki Sanada and Lead Actress for Anna Sawai,Shōgun became FX’s most-watched series ever. So it’s not surprising the network would want more. What is surprising is how they’re going about it, because they don’t have a novel to lean on this time.
FX confirms Season 2 will be “a wholly original new chapter to the first season.” Unlike the debut run, which adapted James Clavell’s bestselling novel, this next installment leaps 10 years into the future.
The show will continue to follow the uneasy alliance and evolving dynamic between John Blackthorne (Jarvis), the English pilot who helped tip the scales of Japan’s civil war, and Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Sanada), who rose to power through brutal strategy and political cunning.
FX teases that the second season “continues the historically-inspired saga of these two men from different worlds whose fates are inextricably entwined.”
That new chapter will begin filming in January, again in Vancouver, despite prior hopes from Hiroyuki Sanada that the series might relocate to Japan. FX Chairman John Landgraf addressed those hopes, explaining the complications:
“It is complicated because of the scale of the stage base and the scale of the production capacity there is just a little different… medieval Japan, the castles are not around in their prior form and frankly if they were, you wouldn’t be able to shoot there anyway.”
So it’s back to Canada, where FX Productions will continue building out the world of feudal Japan with detail and precision.
This time around, Sanada is leveling up behind the scenes too as he’s now an executive producer. Jarvis will also step behind the camera as a co-executive producer.
Returning creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, who just wrapped the writers’ room, have acknowledged the challenge of writing without a Clavell blueprint, noting that Shōgun is the only book in the Asian Saga featuring these characters. Still, they’ve hinted at digging back into the original novel for unused characters and ideas that didn’t make it into Season 1.
Anna Sawai and Tadanobu Asano won’t return as both of their characters met fatal ends last season leaving Jarvis and Sanada as the two surviving leads continuing the saga.
There’s still much we don’t know, but it’s clear this second season is being built with care. Whether it can capture the same lightning-in-a-bottle magic remains to be seen.
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