The Orville

Watched E1 last night with the Mrs., and we were surprised to find it was "not bad", if also not necessarily "good." I laughed more than I expected. I'm glad they went the direction of Malloy and LaMarr being fast friends rather than enemies, though it does leave them with the problem of having two of essentially the same character. That can work itself out in time, though.

And while I by. no. means. like everything he has created, I actually do like Seth McFarlane as a screen presence and think he could be good in this role.

I kind of can't believe this is a thing that exists. 

I liked the most recent, fourth episode, "If The Stars Should Appear," the best - while many Trekkies have (accurately) compared it to the original series Star Trek episode "For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky", the concept more closely resembles to my eyes Robert Heinlein's "Universe," while making use of a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote (in the episode and the episode title) that formed the basis for Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall."

It feels a little like a Star Trek adaptation of that Heinlein story, in other words (a more optimistic and hopeful direction - and drawing the exact opposite meaning from the Emerson quote than Asimov did in his story), but one which then has the MacFarlane sensibility injected into it.

On the other hand it does stuff like "About A Girl," which, if probably not as bad in its earnest effort to table LGBT issues as TNG's "The Outcast," still manages to be an Issue Episode about gender identity for which cisgender binary genital-oriented gender concepts are the only thing that seems to exist. The show has made this misfire a central part of its identity going forward, too - it's not like TNG's "Code of Honor," where we can leave the issues behind us at warp speed.

But I find myself watching that episode for stuff like the triangle-ish table (I swear a TNG episode - probably "Devil's Due" - had one just like it) or how the middle stretch is a wannabe "The Measure of a Man", before it decides it's also "Sins of the Father" - Orville's reverential pastiche of Star Trek episodes and plot points, far beyond what is normal for even the most blatant Trek-inspired TV show, gives that extra metanarrative thrill to it for me, a longtime Trekkie.

I mean - to circle back to "If The Stars Should Appear" again - the opening sequences of the episode have music cues that are dead ringers for Jerry Goldsmith's approach of V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as the episode dutifully tries to convey the Big Space Object-ness of the destination of the week.

This post probably sounds more negative than I feel about this show. It's meticulously designed to get my nostalgia endorphins going, and if it ran for seven seasons, I'd watch every one.

So, there's a strong consensus that this show is decent-to-good. Why the strong critical pile-on?

Right? One review I read complained about the "soda guy" not being funny. It's not like it was intended to be a huge LOL joke, it's just a character quirk.

3 episodes in. I'm liking the show, but the moments when it walks the line between comedy and drama are some of its weakest, and lead to poor world-building. In E2, Mercer reveals that he knows basically nothing about Moclans, including the fact they lay and brood eggs. In the moment it's played for a laugh, "You guys lay eggs? Are they big?" but the joke somewhat abandons what I want Mercer to be. I would hope/expect the captain of an exploratory vessel to know more about Union-friendly species, especially those on his crew. It's his first command, sure, but it's in conflict with the idea that this is something Ed has always wanted. 

I think they want to present Mercer as someone who is generally competent, if not so competent as Grayson, maybe, and playing the character "dumb" for the occasional joke gets in the way.

...I mean, yeah, it is. For about 30% of the time, anyway. This isn't "oh the captain can be such a fuddy-duddy sometimes!"-style TNG humor, this is straight up riffing on alien ejaculations, The Jersey Shore, and Beyonce lyrics. Yeah, it swerves into (and out of, seemingly at random) a "serious" sci-fi story by the second act, but you can't claim that it's not trying to be a comedy when it includes multiple dick jokes per scene.

liebkartoffel Roy Batty's Pet Dove One could probably call it a dramedy. It's not a straight comic version of something popular in the 1990s - that's another new FOX show, Ghosted, where Adam Scott and Craig Robinson do the X-Files (and as that pedigree suggests, it's already the funnier show anyhow.)

And yes, it's kind of a confused tone to strike - Seth MacFarlane has compared it to MASH, but neither his jokes nor his drama are MASH's, and MASH, at any rate, was a sitcom - and I think this tonal tension is one of the reasons critics were put off the show. It'll play a scene straight right out of an act penned circa 1992, and then Ed Mercer will call someone a dick.

I remember watching the Family Guy Star Wars movies and noting there were moments without really any jokes where they were just committed to accurately mimicking a shot from one of the movies but in animation. The Orville is this tendency, this desire to recreate a reference for its own sake, but as the dominant mode of the program. In this sense one of the ways it is most appealing to Star Trek fans is also a way it may leave critics cold.

My point isn't about the number of jokes but the type of humor employed. When jokes show up in a drama, it's usually in service to the plot or characterization--something to lighten the tension or slow the pace down a bit so the viewers can catch their breath. The Orville's jokes, however, are straight out of a sitcom, which have the tendency of grinding everything to halt as the mood shifts completely. The jokes undermine the drama rather than enhance it. Case in point, Seth McFarlane's character: is he supposed to be a competent, compassionate leader or a bumbling idiot who quips about making omelets out of his second officer's eggs? In a comedy, that's not an issue, but in a drama it's important to establish a minimum level of plausibility in order to calibrate everybody's expectations.  

Norm MacDonald sexually harassing Cassidy Yates in every episode is kind of strange, but otherwise I really like this show. Every episode seems to be various TNG plots mixed together...even when I was expecting the episode with the baby to have a happier ending, I realized that oh yeah, they did this downer ending on TNG too (with the androgynous aliens). Alien imposter from the future? TNG did it. Destroying an ancient religion just because fuck you? Just like TOS!

I like it a LOT better than Discovery.

I've been catching up with this show this week, and I'm shocked (I can't stand Family Guy), but...I really like it quite a lot? It's not perfect, and they absolutely haven't entirely successfully integrated the comedy, but you can feel their desire to make an actual Trek-like sci-fi show apart from the jokes, and I'm enjoying it.

I'm going to keep watching both this and Discovery, but at this point DSC's more out of sheer curiosity for just WTF they're going to do with that show, whereas...I feel like I actually enjoy The Orville?

I definitely liked it better than the previous episodes, as well as the most recent episode of Discovery. I still wish they would tone down the reference humor--why the hell would a spaceship pilot from the 24th century (or whenever) have any idea what Avis was?

I would like them to, at some point, do an actual, direct, Star Trek reference (as in refer to watching Star Trek), but I feel like the show has to earn that, and hasn't quite done that yet.

@matt1 I know, that's what interests me - whether or not that money shows on the screen. Another thing the Orville has done is bring back model work to TV - there's a real prop model for the titular starship, the first for a TV show since Star Trek: Voyager as far as I am aware. They hired people who barely get work anymore to put that effect together. But how obvious is that? I

t's not done for any other ship on the show, and they also use a CGI model for many scenes (apparently the more movement a scene involves the more likely they are to use CGI - the ship ducking and weaving along a Krill destroyer is CGI, the ship stately sailing by the camera is the model.) If I didn't know I would have assumed all the starships were CGI all the time.

Just watched the third episode, it was fine for me. I was surprised at the ending, taking it out of the context of the issues it does show that the show is willing to go with a downer ending that will have consequences. My favorite part of the episode was Malloy on the stand, the comedy can be hit or miss but that was pretty amusing.