By It’s the most acclaimed show of the year so far, but don’t expect FX’s “Shōgun” limited series to outstay its welcome.
Creators/showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo have adapted James Clavell’s 1,000-page novel into ten episodes with the first premiering a few weeks back to a very strong nine million streaming views globally in its first six days.
Praised highly for its cultural accuracy and rich world-building, the 17th century feudal Japan-set series starring and produced by Hiroyuki Sanada marks the second screen adaptation of the 1975 book following the 1980s miniseries with Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune.
These days, many shows are more than happy to string out their stories to cover several seasons. That’s not the case here with the pair telling THR that one of the biggest draws on the project is that it ends satisfactorily. Marks says:
“We took the story to the end of the book and put a period at the end of that sentence. 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.
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.
You know, one of our producers wrote a nearly 900-page instruction manual for how we do this show – almost as long as the book Shōgun itself. All of this infrastructural knowledge went into it.
I just hope someone else – maybe a friend – needs a production primer on feudal Japan at some point, so I can be like, ‘Here you go, use this book. That will save you 11 months.’”
The book itself was one of six novels Clavell wrote which is dubbed his Asian saga. Though the third of the six published, it’s the first chronologically. The second is “Tai-Pan,” which tells a new story over two centuries later. It unfolds in Hong Kong in 1842 at the end of the First Opium War when the British seized the island.
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