FX Orders Shogun Miniseries

FX has ordered Shogun, a ten-episode limited series period drama based on the best-selling novel by James Clavell.

Set in feudal Japan, Shogun charts the collision of two ambitious men from different worlds and a mysterious female samurai. It centers on John Blackthorne, a risk-taking English sailor who ends up shipwrecked in Japan, where the unfamiliar culture will ultimately redefine him; Lord Toranaga, a shrewd, powerful daimyo, at odds with his own dangerous, political rivals; and Lady Mariko, a woman with invaluable skills but dishonorable family ties, who must prove her value and allegiance.

The novel Shogun was published in 1975 and became a major bestseller with more than 30 million copies sold worldwide. The original Shogun miniseries event premiered in September 1980 over five nights on NBC.

Shogun will be shot in the U.K. and Japan and produced by FX Productions.

FX has also ordered the limited series Devs, from writer/director Alex Garland. Devs, which had previously been developed as a pilot, will star Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina, Maniac, Crazy Rich Asians), Nick Offerman (Fargo, Parks and Recreation), Jin Ha (Jesus Christ Superstar Live), Zach Grenier (The Good Wife, Deadwood), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Ladybird, Fences, Manchester by the Sea), Cailee Spaeny (Bad Times at the El Royale, Pacific Rim: Uprising) and Alison Pill (American Horror Story: Cult, Snowpiercer). In Devs, a young computer engineer investigates the secretive development division of her employer, a cutting-edge tech company based in San Francisco, who she believes is behind the murder of her boyfriend. The eight-episode series will premiere on FX in 2019.

The network is also going for another installment of Fargo. The fourth in the limited-series franchise is set to return next year with Chris Rock (I Think I Love My Wife, Head of State) on board to star. It will be set in 1950, at the end of two great American migrations: that of Southern Europeans from countries like Italy, who came to the U.S. at the turn of the last century and settled in northern cities like New York and Chicago, and African Americans who left the south in great numbers to escape Jim Crow and moved to those same cities. In Kansas City, Missouri, two criminal syndicates—one Italian and one African American—have struck an uneasy peace. Rock plays the head of one family, a man who in order to prosper has surrendered his oldest boy to his enemy, and who must, in turn, raise his son’s enemy as his own.