I should make this clear up front: I’ve never been the biggest fan of Godzilla movies.

I know that sounds like sacrilege coming from a lifelong monster movie fan. But while I can appreciate on-screen destruction and bellowing creatures as much as anyone, the Godzilla movies left me a little cold. Even the best of them, from the 1954 original with its nightmarish echoes of the atomic war waged on Japan, seemed to have a chasm between the huge creatures, called kaiju, and the people who had to contend with them.

I liked random moments in the many movie versions, including the 1980s reboot of the series and some of the 2010s films produced with bigger budgets. Frankly, the most enjoyable of them might be “Kong: Skull Island,” the 2014 film that worked to establish a shared universe between King Kong and Godzilla and the other giant creatures. The plan led to “Godzilla vs. Kong” in 2021.

But my leeriness about that divide between kaiju and people caused me to delay watching “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” airing on AppleTV+ starting in November. There was a lot of appeal to the show, to be sure, mostly father and son actors Kurt and Wyatt Russell playing the same character, Lee Shaw, at two points in the storyline, decades apart. So it’s a little stunty. Who doesn’t like a good stunt?

But if you come for the premise of a shadowy organization tracking, fighting and manipulating kaiju – here referred to as “Titans” – over more than a half a century – you’ll enjoy not only charismatic performances by the Russells but also one of the most photogenic and sympathetic casts in recent years, including Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons, Ren Watabe and Anders Holm. Not to mention the wonderful Tamlyn Tomita, who we last saw recreating her 1980s “Karate Kid” role in “Cobra Kai.”

There’s a pretty good amount of special effects spectacle in “Monarch” but it never gets repetitive. It punctuates the storyline with the appropriate level of terror mere humans would feel when confronted with literally dozens of Titans.

“Monarch” is carried by the intrigue of its plot, as Sawai and Watabe try to find the father they didn’t know they shared and turn to the elder Russell for help.

“Monarch” is set to run for 10 episodes through mid-January, so you have time to catch up. It’s fun and intriguing.