According to The Hollywood Reporter, while celebrating the success of the first season of Shōgun at the Emmys For Your Consideration event, co-creators Justin Marks (Counterparts, The Jungle Book) and Rachel Kondo (Girl of Few Seasons) teased some information on the second season. It was announced that the series already has the second and third seasons in development. This will expand the series story past the first season and go beyond James Clavell’s (Noble House, Whirlwind) book, which inspired the series. *Warning spoilers ahead*
As per The Hollywood Reporter, creators Marks and Kondo have been working on a second season since December and have joked that they are at the arguing stage of development. Kondo said, “And shooting down each other’s ideas. No, there’s a lot of chaos but creative chaos, where we’re throwing everything that we have at the wall, seeing what sticks. It’s been exciting and nerve-wracking because, obviously, this is uncharted territory — we don’t have a roadmap, we just have history.”
The two creators were recently in Japan, researching different locations. They worked alongside Clavell’s estate as Kondo says they were “trying to study his process of curation. How did he curate, which events, which characters, which characters can you conveniently combine — those sorts of things that kind of allow you to make something new.”
“There’s a lot of great conspiracy theory in history, a lot of different theories about, ‘Oh, it was said that this went on, but this really went on,’ and those little darker corners are what we’ve really enjoyed exploring,” Marks continued, also teasing how they are approaching two future seasons versus just one. “The third season is really an ending. We know where it starts, and we know where it ends, and we know who is there on that journey. We’re just focusing on part two right now to really make sure we can get to that point. But part two is, as second chapters go, kind of a darker chapter.”
Shōgunis is available to stream on Hulu.