‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ co-creator Chris Black teases Season 2: ‘How do we make it bigger and better?’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
The first season of the Apple TV+ drama series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” pulled off something of a magic trick. The series is set within the Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse franchise alongside films like 2014’s “Godzilla” and 2017’s “Kong: Skull Island” and tells the 1950s origin story of the shadowy government agency tasked with tracking titan activity on Earth (and below). But “Monarch” also introduced audiences to several modern characters, each of whom could seemingly power their own narrative if the need arose. Now that Apple has renewed the series for Season 2 (and put plans in the works for spinoffs), the challenge faced by co-creator Chris Black is writing the encore.
“It is such a demanding and complex job to actually produce a season of television, and you become so sort of hyper-focused on what’s in front of you. You hope the show will be successful and that you will have a chance to continue telling the story. But I can only speak for myself: I wasn’t thinking ahead to Season 2 during Season 1. I was like, ‘We just gotta get Season 1 done and we’ll figure out Season 2 when we get to it,’” Black tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview.
Now that Season 2 is here, however, Black and co-creator Matt Fraction are already working on how to resolve the Season 1 finale’s many cliffhangers.
“Where we left the season gave us so much fertile territory for storytelling,” Black says, citing the appearance of Kong and the return of a key character long feared dead. “We want to continue to tell the human story. But there also was a hunger for more spectacle, for more monsters. So how do we make it bigger and better? We revealed Kong at the end of the first season. So there’s going to be an expectation you’re going to see more of Kong and we want to deliver on that. It’s the blessing and the curse of making a hit show: On the one hand, you’re like ‘Oh, we made a hit show.’ Then you also, ‘Oh crap we made a hit show.’”
Set across two timelines – one in the 1950s and one just after the Godzilla attack depicted in the 2014 hit film – “Monarch” focuses largely on the Randa family, including Bill (Anders Holm, playing a young version of the character; John Goodman played Randa in “Kong: Skull Island”), Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), and their grandchildren Cate (Anna Sawai) and Kentaro (Ren Watabe). Across the show’s 10 episodes, mysteries about the Randa family are revealed, all while Cate and Kentaro attempt to stop another potential Godzilla incident with the help of Col. Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell), the long-retired Monarch co-founder who knew Bill and Keiko in his younger days. (The younger version of Lee is played by Wyatt Russell, Kurt’s real-life son.)
“We wanted them to sort of be our Skywalkers,” Black says of the Randa family. In the early stages of the pilot episode, Cate discovers Kentaro is her half-brother and that her father had another family hidden in Japan. “That was really the inflection point at which point we knew we had a story we knew we had something that we could we could use to build a season of television,” Black says of the reveal. “It felt like it covered so many themes about betrayal, about family dynasty, about legacy, about the secrets not only of her family but the secrets of Monarch as an organization. It just wound up being such a great engine to drive these characters forward.”
Production on “Monarch” Season 2 is set to begin later this year and while he doesn’t want to get too far ahead of himself, Black says he does have “some ideas” on where the show could end after three, four, or even five seasons. One thing, however, is clear: fans should expect Kurt and Wyatt to return in some capacity – even though Season 1 ends with the elder Lee’s fate uncertain.
“Having Kurt in the show is an amazing asset and so much fun. He brings so much to the story and the show,” Black says. “So despite the way the first season ends, I don’t think anyone seriously thought, ‘Oh, well, that’s the end of Lee.’”
All episodes of “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” are streaming on Apple TV+.
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