Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks (‘Shōgun’ creators) celebrate the show’s Emmy nomination haul and hint at season 2 [Exclusive Video Interview]

It never occurred to “Shōgun” creators and executive producers Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks that a period drama with mostly Japanese dialogue would do well with audiences. That lack of expectation, Kondo says, allowed the duo go deep into the work. “I think it’s almost what freed us up to just do the work,” she says in an exclusive chat with Gold Derby. “When you don’t expect a huge audience, you’re not constantly thinking about it. So we just had to fall in love with the process itself.” That process, it turns out, yielded more than just critical acclaim and huge ratings. The FX series earned a whopping 25 Emmy nominations, including Best Drama Series and five individual acting bids. Watch more of our chat with Kondo and Marks above.

In adapting James Clavell‘s 1200 page historical epic, the duo looked at the project as individual stories rather than a single long narrative. “We ended up starting to look at each episode like we would a short story,” explains Kondo. “Is there a beginning? Is there a middle? Is there an end? Is there a character arc that we can follow through.” Marks adds that they looked at the way Clavell structured the novel in order to craft each episode. “This is not a 10-hour movie,” he argues. “These were 10 one-hour stories that we hope wrap together as a sags in the way that Clavell did for the book as well. That every story has that short fiction quality of a beginning, middle and end.”

“Shōgun” is nominated twice in the Best Drama Writing category; Marks and Kondo are nominated for “Anjin,” while Kondo and Caillin Puente are nominated for “Crimson Sky.” The series took the risk of submitting six episodes for consideration, a risky strategy, but one that Marks argues reflects the contributions of the entire writing team. “Whether we want to admit it or not, every episode is group written,” he argues. “So I didn’t want to exclude any of our writers from that process. If that means diminishing the chances of a win for anyone, well so be it. Then it’s not a win on terms that I think are fair.”

Work has already begun on writing season two, and Marks offered a few hints of what’s to come. “We really started to be excited, not just about the return of certain characters, but the introduction of new characters as well. And the chance to be kind of radical with the form too,” he says. “There’s some stuff in the first episode, if it makes it through our process, that I’m very excited for audiences to see. I think it’s not at all what we expect, but it’s what we all deserve in a certain way that we think is going to be really fun.”

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