Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ on Apple TV+, with Godzilla Co-Starring in the First Live-Action MonsterVerse TV Series

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters brings the Warner Bros. MonsterVerse film series, recently of Godzilla vs. Kong fame, to the small screen via Apple TV+, with a story divided between the aftermath of 2014’s Godzilla reboot and the initial investigation of giant monsters in the late 1950s. Humans have never been the strong suit of this franchise, but Monarch does its best to thread some ground-level stories into the occasional monster mashing.

MONARCH LEGACY OF MONSTERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Grainy aerial footage (including shots of King Kong himself) taken during a 1973 journey to Skull Island – a trip more thoroughly chronicled in Kong: Skull Island but revisited for the first episode’s opening scene.

The Gist: Monarch is the secret organization that’s spent decades tracking the emergence of Titans, ancient monsters who (we learned in Godzilla vs. Kong) enter our world from the Hollow Earth hidden beneath us. The first episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters follows the company’s work related to two different events depicted in the 2014 Godzilla, featuring two different teams of three. In the late 1950s, a nascent Monarch team of Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell), Bill Randa (Anders Holm, playing a younger version of John Goodman’s character from Kong: Skull Island), and Keiko (Mari Yamamoto) explore a site of monster activity. In 2015, Cate (Anna Sawai), a survivor of Godzilla’s recent rampage through San Francisco, arrives in Japan to settle her late father’s affairs and learns of a family secret that sends her on a fact-finding mission of her own, alongside her half-brother Kentaro (Ren Watabe) and his sardonic hacker pal May (Kiersey Clemons). In later episodes, the 2015 characters cross paths with an older version of Lee – played by none other than Kurt Russell, Wyatt’s real-life dad. These are the two main storylines, but as the season goes on, the show integrates additional flashbacks. (The second episode’s 1950s storyline, for example, is a years-earlier prequel to what we see happening in the first.)

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Superficially, Monarch is probably aiming for some of the cultural buzz of the Star Wars or Marvel shows that attempt to bring big-screen scope to a streaming service. But in some ways, spinning MonsterVerse lore into a TV series feels reminiscent of a late ‘80s Saturday morning cartoon series, or a series of spinoff comics – but in a good way. (In fact, Netflix already dipped into these waters with its surprisingly strong Skull Island anime series.)

Our Take: At a time when Marvel and Star Wars may have oversaturated the market with their various spinoffs, sequels, prequels, and footnotes, the MonsterVerse series of American kaiju stories looks like a model of restraint. When the franchise reaches its tenth anniversary this spring, it will have produced a grand total of five feature films and two TV series, enough to fill out the world it’s constructed around Godzilla and King Kong without rendering it an overly familiar place to visit. This means that Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the MonsterVerse’s first live-action TV series, can still mine compelling details from pieces of offhand world-building, like the glimpse we get of a Godzilla Evacuation Plan for Tokyo, following the world’s introduction to the massive lizard-like Titan. (“San Francisco was a hoax – they did it with CGI,” a cab driver informs our protagonist before promoting his podcast.) But those recent movies are also known – not entirely fairly, but understandably – for having lackluster human characters upstaged by a menagerie of gigantic creatures. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters obviously doesn’t have the budget to let Godzilla stomp around every episode (total diva), which forces it to develop its humans more thoroughly – moreso than the 2014 film, where the cleverness of the filmmaking that hid our boy ‘zilla with ground-level views of his mayhem outstripped the vividness of the actual people on that ground.

While the human characters in Monarch aren’t exactly Mad Men-level literary creations, they all have a scrappy (and not overly quippy) energy that keeps the non-monster action moving. The timeline entanglements of the show’s plotting can feel overcomplicated for a show that still mostly amounts to “go from place to place, and then every 30-60 minutes, a fearsome giant monster shows up,” but it’s also key to the show’s briskness. Similarly, the visual effects aren’t quite movie-level, but the actual monster designs, many carried over from the films, instrumental to the show’s appeal even without affecting photorealism (and anyway, the small-screen effects work is still more impressive than on many of its expanded-universe competitors). In other words, most of the show’s limitations can double as virtues, at least if you’re interested enough in the world of Monarch to tag along on a globe-trotting, timeline-skipping adventure. (It might have been even more delightful to follow some Monarch investigators on X-Files-like standalone cases, but that’s not the world we’re living in.) As far as inessential supplemental materials go, Monarch has a lot of good stuff, in the correct ratio of straight-faced world-building and monster-movie silliness.

Sex and Skin: None in the first few episodes, unless you count the bare, often-scaly skin of various giant creatures.

Parting Shot: A member of the 1950s Monarch team slips and falls into a particularly creepy-crawly pit of darkness.

Sleeper Star: There are a lot of familiar faces here, but Anna Sawai (who also appeared in the Apple production Pachinko) anchors the contemporary sections with no-nonsense gravity; Mari Yamamoto does the same in some flashback scenes opposite Holm and the younger Russell.

Most Pilot-y Line: In the opening sequence, John Goodman, playing the older version of Holm’s character (apparently a lot happened in the mere 14 years that are supposed to separate them), makes a video for his kid in a moment of desperation, saying he hopes he’ll be able to leave behind some sort of legacy for him.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you don’t care about the MonsterVerse movies, this show probably won’t change your mind. However, if you’re into Godzilla, Kong, or the various Titans who square off against them, Monarch is a lot of fun.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.