Commentary — ‘Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters’ Learns From The Lessons Of ‘Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.’
by Frank Martin
If the past is any indication, it’s extremely difficult to do a television show spun off from a successful film franchise. Cinematic universes are a fragile thing. Film is dealt with one installment at a time; the stories are contained and easily navigated. A TV series is very different. There’s a lot of ground to cover across a number of episodes, each one affecting the canon in a different way. This is how Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ran into trouble during its initial seasons. It eventually found its footing by not leaning into the plotlines of the ongoing film cycles. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters learned from this lesson and thrived as a result.
The program takes place in the Monsterverse, which primarily consists of the Godzilla films made by Legendary Pictures. It focuses on the creation and mission of Monarch — a governmental agency monitoring Titans (the name for kaiju in the Monsterverse). The plot shifts back and forth between the 1950s and the present day. In the past, Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell and Kurt Russell) work to catalog Titans during Monarch’s early days. Due to time dilation while in in the Titan world, they have emerged younger in the modern era, where Keiko works with her son, Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira), and his children to continue their legacy of battling these monsters.
The main draw of Monarch is obviously the monsters. That’s what audiences want to see. Just like they want to see superhero action in S.H.I.E.L.D. When it first began, the series leaned heavily on the Marvel Cinematic Universe to provide the plot for that superhero action. Only in subsequent seasons did it decide to develop its own superheroes to drive the plot forward. Monarch has done something similar. It created an original storyline with human characters to care for while inserting the monsters as part of their journey. Although Godzilla and King Kong appear, they don’t drive the narrative. The humans and newly-devised Titans do. This keeps the show from falling into the trap of relying too much on its famous icongraphy.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is now streaming on AppleTV.