Yahoo News In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Godzilla Is ‘No Longer a Mystery But a Fact of Life’ — Plus, EP Downplays ‘Required’ Movies
There’s a pretty amazing moment in the first episode of Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, in which Cate Randa, a former school teacher visiting Japan from the States, clocks airport signage for the “Godzilla Evacuation Route.” (See photo above.)
This comes just minutes after Cate and the other arriving passengers were sprayed, before deplaning, with an anti-parasitic decontaminant.
More from TVLine
In other words, in the years since Cate and so many others witnessed first-hand Godzilla’s marauding of The Golden City (aka “G-Day”), the accepted existence of said daikaiju is really no big whoop.
“Early on as we were developing the show, we sort of shorthanded that ‘it’s not a 9/11 show, it’s a 9/12 show,'” Chris Black (Severance, Star Trek: Enterprise), who serves as Monarch: LoM showrunner, tells TVLine. “The world we wanted to build was one where Godzilla was no longer a mystery but a fact of life. What would that look like? How would that feel?”
In a post G-Day society, “Everything is different, and it affects the world in these granular, almost banal, annoying ways,” Black adds. “You go, ‘Oh, we have to go wait in this bunker until they give us the all-clear.’ That’s just the new normal.”
Developed by Black and Matt Fraction (whose Hawkeye comics heavily influenced the Disney+ series of the same name), Monarch: LoM is set after the battle between Godzilla and the Titans that leveled San Francisco and confirmed that monsters are real, in the 2014 film Godzilla.
The 10-episode season follows two timelines — one in which half-siblings Cate and Kentaro (played by Anna Sawai and Ren Watabe) follow in their father’s footsteps, with help from tech-savvy May (Kiersey Clemons), to uncover his connection to the secretive organization known as Monarch. (In the Monsterverse, Monarch was founded as a joint effort between multiple governments to hunt/study “massive unidentified terrestrial organisms” aka MUTOs.)
The second timeline takes place in the 1950s, where researchers Dr. Keiko Mura (Mari Yamamoto) and Bill Randa (Anders Holm), accompanied by Army lieutenant Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell), endeavor to uncover Skull Island’s secrets. (Russell’s real-life father Kurt Russell plays Shaw in the present-day storyline.)
Yet despite sharing DNA with both Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island (John Goodman briefly reprises his role from the latter, as the older Bill Randa), the Apple TV+ drama’s EPs believe that those who have yet to dip their toe into the Monsterverse — or, those (like me) who frankly forgot what happened on the big screen! — can go in pretty cold.
“Our hope is that there’s no ‘required’ movie viewing,” Black says. “One of the things we set out to do, as [EP/director] Matt [Shakman] likes to put it, is this should be a show you shouldn’t have to do homework” to enjoy. “You can jump in and meet a young woman who uncovers a family secret, and that her father wasn’t who she thought he was, and she’s got a brother she never knew. This a mystery you can unravel without watching any of the Godzilla movies.
“That said…,” Black notes, “I think of the current crop, probably Kong: Skull Island” is good to have seen, “because it introduces the Bill Randa character.” Ditto, Godzilla (2014), for obvious reasons.
“But really, if you just have cultural awareness of who and what Godzilla is, you’re ready to go.”
And make no mistake, Godzilla you will get, along with weekly unleashings of other frightful MUTOs, like Mother Longlegs and Mantleclaw — and that’s just in Episode 1 alone.
Featuring CGI monsters of their own, and not settling for spinning a dodgy, all-humans story (as a less-ambition show or streamer might have done), was imperative for Monarch: LoM‘s creatives.
“We needed to have the best of both worlds,” says Black. “We needed to have a character-driven, character-forward story that felt like an Apple TV+ show, but at the same time, there is an expectation that if you’re doing the Godzilla show, you have to deliver.
“Fans of those movies are going to come to this, expecting Godzilla, and expecting a caliber of production value and visual effects that cannot be a step down from the feature films,” the EP adds. “Tat is one of the reasons we were so lucky to get [WandaVision‘s Matt Shakman] to direct the first two episodes.”
Want scoop on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, or for any other TV show ? Email InsideLine@tvline.com, and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!
Best of TVLine
Get more from TVLine.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter
