‘Monarch’ Boss on Dottie’s Future, That Flashforward Mystery & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Monarch series premiere “Stop at Nothing.”]

Did Monarch just kill off Susan Sarandon in the first episode?!

Well, here’s what we know. Sarandon’s Dottie has cancer and decides she wants to die “on her own terms,” turning to daughter Nicky (Anna Friel) to help here. Nicky does, reluctantly. When her sister Gigi (Beth Ditto) walks in at the end, Nicky says Dottie’s gone. Meanwhile, three months later, someone is definitely dead, and Albie’s (Trace Adkins) burying a body.

So what’s next after that dramatic premiere? TV Insider turned to showrunner Jon Feldman to find out.

Why kill off Dottie in the premiere?

Jon Feldman: You’re gonna have to tune in to future episodes to see what happened to her. All will be revealed soon enough, but I will say that Susan’s gonna appear in multiple episodes over the course of the first season and Dottie looms over everything that affects and threatens the Romans.

Though Nicky is hesitant, she does help Dottie like her mother asked. Why?

Nicky is and was raised to be the dutiful daughter. She’s her mother’s daughter, and, in many respects, she’s put her own career behind her mother. She’s also subsumed large parts of herself to ascribe to Dottie’s way of looking at the world. And I think she loves her mother and, like I said, she was raised to do as her mother told her. And so she’s trying to be a good daughter in potentially helping her mother end her own life.

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What is that going to do to Nicky though going forward? Dottie told her not to tell anyone.

Nicky’s gonna have quite a few secrets to juggle and what’s gonna happen on our show is the two timelines are gonna converge and the Romans — Nicky, Albie, Gigi, Luke [Joshua Sasse], but really Nick and Albie principally among them — find themselves grappling with all the secrets and all the crimes and compromises that they’ve been a part of over years.

How is Albie going to be handling Dottie’s death, given that last conversation they had?

I can’t confirm that she’s dead, but I’ll say that there’s a line that Albie utters later in the season: He says “Lies are the real Roman legacy.” And all the characters are going to have to confront lies. They’re gonna kind of come home to roost over the course of the first season. And these aren’t ordinary lies. They’re lies involving murder and crimes and blackmail and affairs and coverups and deaths. And Albie is gonna have to grapple with that along with everyone else.

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Speaking of secrets, Dottie does say “I’ve done things that can never be forgiven.” What can you say specifically about that and how that affects her family?

That’s another mystery that we’re gonna unfold and unpeel over the course of the season. If you remember, there were [some] memories that Dottie had involving fire, memories of her at an earlier time in her life, and that is going to, like fire, grow over the course of the season, until her family is going to be forced to grapple with those things that can never be forgiven, the things that Dottie has done.

What are we going to see when it comes to Dottie’s relationships with her kids after the premiere? People might remember someone or some things differently after a big event…

One of the things about getting older is starting to see your parents not simply as these unfailing entities but as real human beings. I think one of the things that the kids gonna grapple with is kind of coming to terms with who their mother was to them and who their mother was to the world and really kind of asking the question, can you be a superstar and also a good mother at the same? Because many of the qualities that make people stars don’t make them good mothers. All the kids have their own separate relationship with Dottie.

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Nicky was kind of thrown there when it comes to Gigi — first when her sister joined her on the stage, then when she revealed that she hadn’t done that before for her. What does that do to their relationship going forward, especially since people are noticing Gigi’s star power?

That sister relationship is really gonna be one of the most important ones that we’re gonna chart over the first season and it’s really gonna put them to the test. Can they remain as best friends and loving sisters in the face of what will be a competition to step into the spotlight that may have been left open by their mother? It’s an incredibly fraught relationship between two women who, as much as they want to deny they’re in a competition with each other, will soon find themselves in a competition with each other

And they don’t know it yet, but they both will be dealing with infidelity in their marriages. Nicky knows, Gigi doesn’t.

Yes, and infidelity and affairs and the impact that secrets like that have is gonna impact all of them in actually some surprising ways going forward.

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That love triangle now set up with Gigi, her wife (Meagan Holder), and her brother — what can you say about how dramatic that will get?

The love triangle between Gigi and Luke and Kayla is really gonna unfold and explode over the course of the season. Kayla is torn. She loves Gigi, but she also has a profound emotional connection with her brother. And we really tried to humanize that, but at the same time, we’re really kind of leaning into the full stakes of what’s gonna happen because as the Romans learn, you can’t keep secrets covered forever, be they bodies or be they affairs or be they crimes that you committed in past. Everything eventually will come to light.

It seems like Luke is the one who’s not doing quite as well as his sisters, too. And so to have another aspect of his life not going his way can’t be good.

A really interesting relationship, I think, on the show is the one between Luke and his father, and we see glimpses of it in the pilot. We see Luke and Albie bumping heads. We see Luke seeking out his mother to understand why his father doesn’t appreciate him. And that’s a relationship that in Episode 2 and beyond is really gonna become an explosive one. And let’s just say, to say the least, punches will be thrown between these two men going forward.

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I’m not surprised. Albie threw a punch in the premier. And then also, that line about most CEOs not being handpicked by their mom almost is worse…

Those punches will come soon enough. And that father-son conflict, which is fraught with both subtext and text as to why these two men butt heads, is going to explode in violence on more than one occasion.

Speaking of violence, the mystery set up in the flash forward — what can you say about that?

That’s a really important part of our show going forward. In addition to being this larger than life country music drama, we do have a murder mystery going on and our two timelines will continue for the first handful of episodes until they converge towards the end of Episode 6, when we finally start to address the question of who’s dead and what are the circumstances around that death and that will all play out in future episodes in our season.

Monarch, Time Period Premiere, Tuesday, September 20, 9/8c, Fox