Family Guy mastermind Seth MacFarlane is famously a pretty big fan of science and science-fiction. His various animated series have featured numerous cameos from Star Trek actors—including a recurring part for Patrick Stewart on American Dad—and he was instrumental in reviving the scientific inquiry program Cosmos for Fox in 2014.
Now, MacFarlane is boldly going somewhere he’s never gone before: starring in a live-action TV series, with Deadline reporting that the Ted director and star is developing a science fiction dramedy for Fox. The series—which MacFarlane is also writing—centers on the crew of the Orville, an exploratory vehicle for the people of Earth, which is described as being “not-so-top-of-the-line” (even though a pretty good “less than stellar” space pun was waiting right there). That would seemingly place the untitled series in a long lineage of shows and movies about dysfunctional star ship crews, from John Carpenter’s Dark Star, to Red Dwarf, to Thomas Lennon’s failed U.S.S. Alabama or Yahoo’s recent Other Space.
The show will be MacFarlane’s first time as the lead on a live-action show; he’s previously starred in a voice-acting role on most of his TV shows and Ted, and appeared in the flesh in A Million Ways To Die In The West.