Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters review: A surprisingly good Godzilla series

In movies where there are big, cool things (dinosaurs, Transformers, etc.) and also regular little humans, it’s safe to assume that the humans will always, always, always be less interesting than a big, cool thing. That’s not to say that any movie with a dinosaur is better than any movie without one, but if a movie has a dinosaur, everyone’s going to be more interested in seeing the dinosaur than the dinosaur’s human friends. That, naturally, also applies to Legendary and Warner Bros.’ series of “MonsterVerse” movies, which have featured loads of very talented/famous actors—Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston, Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, Charles Dance, Millie Bobby Brown—but only really pop when there’s a monster onscreen doing cool monster stuff.

And yet, paradoxical as it may be, the people are actually fun to follow in Apple TV+’s MonsterVerse spin-off Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters, which premieres November 17. And Godzilla is in the show! You get to see Godzilla every few episodes! And other monsters! This isn’t one of those TV shows that doesn’t have monsters, so you have no choice but to pay attention to what the humans are doing. This is a show that has monsters, and yet the humans and their little human plots are the more propulsive narrative force.

Even better is the fact that, while that may sound like damning with faint praise, it’s not. The show is good—surprisingly good—in a way that occasionally surpasses the stuff you see in the movies. For example, Millie Bobby Brown being Godzilla’s friend in Godzilla: King Of The Monsters was a narrative contrivance, like the movie just needed someone on the human side who could root for the lizard. Most of Monarch’s humans, though, offer a more grounded take on the human perspective, like Anna Sawai’s Cate, who was left deeply traumatized after witnessing the destruction of San Francisco in the 2014 Godzilla movie.

Seeing what life is like for regular people in a world where Godzilla exists is a great hook for a TV show, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff on that topic in Monarch (like designated Godzilla shelters in Tokyo or a sequence set in the ruins of San Francisco that frames the broken remains of the Golden Gate Bridge like a perpetual monument to mankind’s worthlessness in the face of Godzilla). It gradually stops being about that, since there’s a few conspiracies to untangle and mysteries to solve, but it’s a credit to the basic appeal of a world where Godzilla exists that the show itself doesn’t stop being interesting when it shifts away from that fascinating small-stakes perspective.

Speaking of shifting perspectives, it’s going to be hard to ever talk about Monarch without talking about its much-publicized split-timeline gimmick, where some of the show takes place in the ’50s at the birth of Monarch—a government organization built around hunting monsters—and the rest takes place shortly after the events of the 2014 Godzilla, with Wyatt Russell playing the ’50s version of a man named Lee Shaw and Kurt Russell playing the more modern-day version of the same guy. That’s also a great hook, though it does raise some questions about how old Kurt Russell’s version of Shaw is supposed to be (questions that the show lampshades from time to time, with characters noting that Shaw should be in his 90s even though he doesn’t look it).

The two Russells are predictably great, though it takes a bit for Wyatt to liven up. By the time both versions of Shaw are introduced, it’s clear that they’re having some fun with the role—and it’s even more clear that Kurt is just kind of playing a regular Kurt Russell character while Wyatt is having to work a little harder to play Kurt Russell as a young and uptight military man (which is not a regular Kurt Russell character these days).