I have been seeing a lot of people asking questions about the recently announced Godzilla tv series for Apple TV+ and they're questions that nobody can really answer. These are questions that not even I could answer, but only speculate. There is just stuff that we know now and the list of stuff of what do know is very small at the moment.
The information we do know about the show are that:
it takes place after Godzilla (2014)
the story follows a family trying to uncover a family legacy with Monarch
and Godzilla and other monsters will be in it.
I will be real with you. I am not expecting Godzilla and other monsters to show up a whole lot in this series. I expect it to be much like Godzilla (2014) where the human characters and the story are the bigger focus than the monsters. The show will have a slow build up to a monster that wakes up mid-way through the season and then Godzilla appears in the second to last episode to fight the monster.
I remember a tv show called Surface, which aired on NBC for 15 episodes, and it was basically a live-action kaiju tv show that followed two or three different stories happening at the same time. In the show, one story followed a marine biologist and an insurance salesman trying to prove these sea monsters were real while being chased by government agents. The second part of the show followed a kid that found these eggs in a swamp and decides to hatch one of these eggs while also dealing with being bullied in school and not having his family pay attention to him enough.
Surface had a lot of scenes showing monsters, government coverups and conspiracies, and a family sub-plot. It was a sort of similar idea to the synopsis of the Godzilla tv show. I am not saying that this is how the Monsterverse tv series will be, but I am giving you an idea of what happened last time a studio made a live-action kaiju tv show that did something similar. I don’t think we will see a kid take an interest in raising a baby monster or a baby Godzilla nor have two separate stories going on. However, I do recommend giving Surface a watch so you can see what NBC did with a similar idea. Maybe I could do a review on Surface some time if you guys are interested.
I have also seen a lot of people begging for Ken Watanabe to return to play Dr. Serizawa. I can see Dr. Serizawa being mentioned and referenced a lot in this show, but I don't see this actor returning to play this character. We might see flashbacks of Dr. Serizawa from Godzilla (2014), but that will be the closest to getting Dr. Serizawa in the show.
In fact, I don't see any major characters like Ford Brody (played by Aaron Taylor Johnson) or Mark Russell (played by Kyle Chandler) making big appearances in the show, either. If there is one actor that does make an appearance, it would be Sally Hawkins returning as Dr. Vivienne Graham since she was Dr. Serizawa's assistant and didn't play a big role in Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I can see her popping in from time to time telling the main characters about possible Titan activity happening somewhere and she was tasked by Dr. Serizawa off-screen to go and investigate it and the main characters follow her as an opportunity to get some answers.
One idea I have for this series is if the show concentrated on Ren Serizawa and his struggle to get his father to pay attention to him and his mother. Based on the Godzilla vs Kong novel, we learned that Dr. Serizawa had a family that he never got to see most of the time due to his work and his obsession with Godzilla. The novel even went as far as to say that this character was so obsessed with Godzilla and his work that he missed his wife's funeral and told Ren that she would have understood. So I can see the series go in the direction where in order for Ren to cope with his father being absent, Ren digs into his father’s office reading his journals and research papers just find out what is going through Dr. Serizawa’s mind and find a way to reach out to him. Perhaps Ren proposes new tech that would help Monarch contain the monsters just to impress his dad hoping to have a chance to sit down and talk with him.
What would be really cool to see if some of the scenes from the Godzilla Aftershock graphic novel gets made in live action. Imagine in the season finale we see the whole fight between Godzilla and MUTO Prime play out start to finish. We know that the Monsterverse graphic novels have been canon to the story, but they never really get tied into the movies. The graphic novels only ever get mentioned in the movie novelizations. Since this show takes place after Godzilla (2014) there is potential to adapt some of the scenes from the graphic novels into this show so they really do have actual ties with the movies.
What do you guys think we will see in the Godzilla tv show? Do you think we will see a lot of monster action? Do you think Godzilla will make a lot of appearances or only one or two appearances? Do you think Dr. Serizawa could show up or only mentioned in conversation? Leave a comment on what you think this show will be like. Make sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Minds, MeWe, and Gab to stay up to date for more news, reviews, and discussions.