“Tokyo Vice” creator and executive producer J.T. Rogers had a two-season story mapped out from the beginning, so much so that he had to make sure that the first season of the Max drama seeded the details and Easter eggs that wouldn’t pay off or become important until the second season.
“The pressure for me at least was having an idea going on for a few years now and really champing at the bit to get to the places we wanted,” Rogers tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “Hikari, our wonderful director on Episode 4 in Season 1, said, ‘I don’t think we have time to get that shot of the watch.’ I said, ‘You need it because 11 hours from now on television, there’s going to be a reference to it.’ So there are so many things we set up narratively, and to have the luxury of knowing you were going to be able to do it in that long-form, novelistic storytelling, it was more just an excitement to finally get there.”
Rogers describes Season 1 as “setting the table” and Season 2 as “the meal.” And everyone got to dine out on a bigger meal with an expanded episode order for the second season, which ended in April after 10 episodes, two more than the inaugural installment. That extra runway was a gift in helping set the stage for a conclusion that provided closure but left the door ajar for future stories.
“Ansel [Elgort] and Ken [Watanabe] in Season 1, where they were the fulcrums of the story. In Season 2, because we had more episodes and because we had learned how to shoot in Tokyo, we were able to really bring forward the density of the lives of all the other characters surrounding our leads and give them almost equal time on the playing field,” executive producer and director Alan Poul says. “That was something that we earned, both by the work that we were doing and in becoming better at shooting in Tokyo and in the work that J.T. had done in laying all the groundwork in making all these characters so satisfying.”
In the finale, “Endgame,” Tozawa (Ayumi Tanida), who had been colluding with the FBI, kills himself after being outwitted by his wife, Kazuko (Makiko Watanabe) — the true power player of the series — who offers him an ultimatum: off yourself now and die “honorably” or we’ll do it for you and make it very messy. Tozawa’s demise occurs thanks to the different forces viewers have been following for two seasons — the journalists, the police, the yakuza — coming together to achieve that common goal. But it’s a bittersweet victory for our protagonists, all of whom lose something in the win. Difficult situations call for difficult choices, and they were all forced to make one. Or a few. The fictional Jake Adelstein (Elgort) destroyed his friendship with Trendy (Takaki Uda) after giving up a source and ditched his family during a visit home to chase a lead. Katagiri (Watanabe) has already lost his wife and kids, who went into hiding. Samantha (Rachel Keller) loses her club. Sato (Show Kasamatsu) already lost his mentor, Ishida (Shun Sugata), and can no longer leave organized crime behind after getting promoted to oyabun of the Chihara-kai.
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“Everything has a double-edged nature to it,” Poul notes, adding of the reluctant leader, “In the end, we are celebrating and we are so happy for Sato that he gets to ascend to be the head of a major crime family. … No Michael Corleone analogies, please.”
“Yay! You got the thing that you were really ambivalent about and really didn’t want but somehow you’re so good at, you just kept rising through the ranks,” Rogers quips. “All along — and I’ve talked to everyone about this, and Alan and I spoke a lot about this as well when he was directing and just running the show with me — this is a show about people who have exciting, desperate needs that are glitzy and super exciting, but it’s about the cost of getting what you want or what you think you want. And who are you and what do you choose when all of your options are bad? As often in war, there’s a sense of exhaustion and exhilaration and heartbreak. And that’s what I was looking for.”
After telling the story they set out to tell, “Tokyo Vice” is over for now. Max, Rogers and Poul confirmed over the weekend that there are no current plans for a third season at the streamer. “Endgame” works as a series finale, but Rogers and Poul hope to produce more “Tokyo Vice” at some point. Rogers has ideas for a third season that might pull from the real Adelstein’s second book, “Operation Tropical Storm: How an FBI Jewish-Japanese Special Agent Snared a Yakuza Boss in Hawaii.”
“Never speak until you’ve written it. Don’t let the cat out of the bag yourself. But I have a very clear idea going forward of story based on the book, based on the fact that Fifth Season, our partners, have the rights to Jake’s second book, the fact that Jake and I are friends and the endless stories he’s told me,” he shares. “So if we get to do it, there’s lots more.”
Because Max does not stream “Tokyo Vice” globally, the show is sold to most international markets by Fifth Season. “We have millions of fans in other territories on other streamers and other broadcast outlets who are waiting to see what happens next,” Poul adds. “And we hope to be able to satisfy them.”
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