Seth MacFarlane swears The Orville isn’t actually dead
"There is no official death certificate for The Orville," MacFarlane said of his Hulu show, which last aired new episodes in 2022
Aux News The Orville
It’s been more than a year since Seth MacFarlane and Hulu released the third season of The Orville, MacFarlane’s weirdly sincere effort to merge the space-based storytelling of his beloved Star Trek: The Next Generation with his more usual brand of television comedy. But despite evidence to the contrary—notably, the cast being released from their contract back in 2022, before the show’s third season even actually came out, due to long delays caused by COVID—MacFarlane has just reasserted that the show isn’t actually dead.
This is per an interview that the Family Guy and Ted creator gave to The Wrap this week, stating that, “All I can tell you is that there is no official death certificate for The Orville. It is still with us. I can’t go any further than that at the moment. There are too many factors.” Co-star Scott Grimes, who’s currently working with MacFarlane on the TV version of Ted, said he still has confidence that the sci-fi show might get a fourth season, noting that, “I do know that we are still talking about it. It’s not dead in any sort of way whatsoever. It’s just about when, where, and how, and building the stuff again.”
That’s an altogether rosier picture than the one presented by co-star Adrianne Palicki last year, while she was talking to Michael Rosenbaum for his Inside Of You podcast in November 2023—telling Rosenbaum that she had genuinely no idea whether the show would ever come back, and pointing out that the cast and crew had made “33 episodes in six years.” (Palicki, engagingly candid, went so far as to suggest that COVID lockdowns weren’t the only reason it took forever for season 3 to get made, noting that MacFarlane’s desire to write every episode of the show significantly slowed things down.)
The Orville has not had an easy time of things over the last few years; the show was in the midst of filming its third season, slated for the move to Hulu from its original (not especially appreciated) home on Fox, when the COVID-19 lockdowns hit. The one thing it really has going for it, honestly, is that MacFarlane still clearly adores it, and still has a hefty amount of pull in the industry. (That, and the show’s consistently fervent fanbase, who hung on after a fairly rough first season as it eventually got more confident in its sci-fi storytelling.)
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Fun show, a bit redundant now that Strange New Worlds is carrying the old school episodic live action Star Trek tradition.
Well The Orville might not be dead, but Norm MacDonald sure is.
And the person who did it? That’s right, Frank Stallone!
I thought you were goin’ to “crack whore”, but no.
I was with them for the first two seasons. The show really felt like they could’ve been part of the same universe but the Federation’s little brother who couldn’t be trusted with transporters.Third season… eh. Leaned way heavy into the drama, and… er… that’s now essentially just saying “Hey, I want to make my own actual version of Star Trek”. I kinda stopped after the second or third episode.Hit or miss the humor may have been, but it was a major part of why I watched.
“You all look like unemployed backup dancers.”
I did watch the whole third season, but I agree that it wasn’t as good as the first two. I think the main problem was the very thing they trumpeted about their move to Hulu, which was more creative freedom and longer episodes. The problem was that the longer episodes meant a breakdown in narrative discipline, leading to drawn-out scenes and subplots that could and should have been shorter. It also didn’t help that several of the episodes were ultimately dramatically inert; the episode where the crew is being experimented on (via elaborate simulations) by advanced aliens in order to experience their fear of death was just… dull. They encounter a situation, they’re confused, they figure it out (or don’t) and move on to the next one. It felt like it didn’t amount to anything, and a lot of the episodes felt that way.
OTOH, that season gave us the episode where Malloy was stuck in the past for 10 years and is so pissed at being left behind he hooks up with the iPhone girl from season 2 and doesn’t want to go back, so Ed says fine we’re going back another ten years and then your kid never exists. That alone was worth the entire season.
I notice they still haven’t said what happened to her in the regular timeline.
Yeah fuck that was brutal, but it was the exact sort of “we uphold the prime directive no matter what” stuff I like to see. No cute deus ex machina splitting them off to another timeline, or anything like that. The conversation at the end where that version of Malloy got so pissed at himself and just couldn’t comprehend being that selfish was also just amazing, because you can tell it did not make Ed or Kelly feel any better.
Yeah, I liked that resolution; my only problem with the story was that they were kind of dicks about it to Gordon when they meet him in the “married for 10 years” timeline. Ed and Kelly should have known to broach the subject more delicately than they did, realizing that this version of Gordon wasn’t going to respond well to their insistence that he erase his family from existence.
Twice in a lifetime is one of the best episodes of the entire series. It deserves to be mentioned along side Star Trek episodes like Measure of a Man or In the pale moonlight.
It’s very difficult for me to appreciate the idea that the humor in season one, especially, added anything to the show. From the very beginning. McFarlane clearly was not interested in doing the thing that Lower Decks subsequently did (and fairly successfully, once it lowered the manic volume by a few notches), so we had this situation where an important ship doing important things was also dabbling in peurile gross-out humor and lame workplace humor. That “humor” was almost all misses, in my book. One-note gag characters ate up entire scenes and added nothing, and nobody seemed to know what to do with the recurring ones. The majority of the crew was competent and functional, so it wasn’t a meditation on mediocrity or failure in an impressive post-scarcity future, either.
There’s this idea floating around that maybe humanity can get to something resembling the Federation without losing so much of the monkey madness, and that’s interesting enough… but again, Lower Decks swooped in and accomplished that, too.Man, I really did not like Lower Decks when it debuted, but talking about The Orville’s first season just begs the comparison in every which way, and the comparison consistently favors the former. Season 3 of The Orville, by contrast, was at least finally what McFarlane clearly wanted to do all along, even if you didn’t like it. The ship and the crew were the center of the universe, everybody was awesome at their jobs, and big-ticket issues shared airtime with major serialized plot points. It made sense, and was functional.
I don’t know how accurate this is, but I recall reading somewhere that a lot of the god-awful humor in the first season was basically a smokescreen to get Fox to pick up the show — the network wouldn’t have been interested in “Seth MacFarlane does his own take on Star Trek,” so he sold them on “Seth MacFarlane scrapes together a live-action version of the lazy-but-profitable comedy his animated shows are known for, just don’t ask too many questions about why it looks like Star Trek.” Given how the ‘humor’ gets dialed back pretty quickly during season 1 (and the whole season was filmed before airing so it couldn’t have been in response to the initial reception), it’s pretty easy to see a scenario with production going smoothly enough that the network stops paying close attention to the show being made. And once they stop paying attention, Seth starts getting rid of the whoopie cushions and the fake dog vomit.
All I know is that what got me interested in the show was seeing a couple of out of context clips on YouTube back to back — the season 1 scene with Bortus eating things in the cafeteria, and then Bortus’ speech to the Union in season 3, episode 8. And I was like “Okay, now I have to know how the show starts off here and winds up there.”
I liked the humor in season one a lot better than the drama in the second 2. The whole ‘Nurse doesn’t understand that the robot doesn’t have emotions and gets angry about why, again, a robot doesn’t have emotions’ was an amazingly stupid story to hang a large part of the plot on. It entirely lost me whenever that plot was happening.
Honestly, the way the 3rd season ended, I could see it as a fitting series finale. But if Macfarlane really wants to continue on, then I guess one more season as a final season might be ok. However, from what Palicki said in that interview, it might take convincing for some to come back. I know a lot of those in the cast made a living being character actors and voice actors. But the show’s schedule, the lockdowns, and their contract clauses made their living inconsistent. So some of them may have been happy to be part of the show, but relieved that they were released from their contract after season 3 to move on. So, probably getting everyone back together was the promise of a better schedule and just a one and done final season. Which again, I would be fine with. I did like it fine enough, but I agree with some of the other fans that the last season was so heavy on the drama. I wasn’t looking for Family Guy meets Star Trek, but a little more comedy that balances out it’s sci-fi.
That’s my feeling as well. It’s one of those things where they (IMO) executed on dramatic plotlines and arcs in the first two seasons very effectively and took that as a cue to really lean into and explore that with the additional creative freedom they said they got from Hulu.The thing is, though, that sometimes the limited amount of something you’re allowed to do because of creative or other guardrails ends actually being the right amount. That seems to have been the case here, even though it wasn’t, like, a disastrous shift in tone or anything.
My prediction: it’ll come back as an animated series. Voiceover work can be done on a much easier schedule; no need to build back the sets; McFarlane can do voiceover in his sleep.
This is almost nothing to go off of, but I wouldn’t hate seeing more of it. It had it’s moments for sure, and they had the balls to change a stupid Star Trek parody into something much different and much more interesting. Also, kinda shows that TNG-style Star Trek can still be awesome, especially compared to Nu-Trek stuff.
Does Seth have another girlfriend he needs to employ?