MONARCH Post-Mortem: Susan Sarandon and the Executive Producers on the Fallout from the Dottie Twist

[Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the MONARCH series premiere.]

MONARCH ended its series premiere with a brutal twist: Queen of Country Dottie (Susan Sarandon), who was facing a fatal illness, opted to end her life—and asked her daughter, Nicky (Anna Friel), to be by her side when she did it.

Originally, Nicky pushed back, but Dottie got her way and the duo were together in Dottie’s final moments. Unfortunately for Nicky, however, Dottie’s other daughter, Gigi (Beth Ditto), stumbled upon the immediate aftermath and asked her sister what happened.

And while Dottie is dead, her presence from the show is far from over. “I’ll be around as long as they’ll have me,” Sarandon said during the show’s Television Critics Association panel. “I love this family, love this show. I think it’s so much fun, everything I hoped it would be.”

“Susan’s a part of the show,” showrunner Jon Harmon Feldman added. “She hovers over everyone. She influences everything. She comes in and out of the show; so she will appear in multiple episodes, and we have some great stuff planned for her…So she is a looming presence, both on screen and off on MONARCH in season 1.”

Though Sarandon joked she “fought very hard” to keep Dottie alive, creator Melissa London Hilfers noted the tragedy was always a part of the show’s DNA.

“In the very first pitch for the pilot, we get to the end, and what happens happens; and the president of the network said, ‘Well, that’s not really going to happen. Dottie’s not really going to die,'” London Hilfers recalls. “And I said, ‘She is. We’ll have ways of bringing her back, but she’s really going to die.'”

“And it was important to us that that happened in the pilot, because it shows the kind of bold storytelling that we’re doing,” she continued. “You never know what to expect and what’s going to happen next, and there are shocking things that happen.”

“But Dottie’s really a big part of the show—you’ll see,” Feldman continued. “She’s in multiple episodes…she’s really a big presence in our show.”

MONARCH, Tuesday, September 20, 9/8c, Fox

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