The Orville: Way Too Good To Die This Young

TV has always had its share of ‘culty’ series. A little off the beaten path like Northern Reflections, or sometimes a lot, like Twin Peaks and The Prisoner.

These are the kinds of shows that I have always been attracted to, mainly because they sat outside the mainstream of whatever genre they happened to occupy, if you indeed they could be classified.

In sci-fi, and especially franchise sci-fi, this is a lot harder to do. But IMHO, The Orville, as part of the Star Trek empire of shows, has managed to pull that off.

The Orville was created, written, stars and sometimes is even directed by Seth McFarlane, who is pretty high quality Hollywood comedic actor. So you have a certain oddity right there. I mean what business does a comic actor have trying to insert himself into a role that normally belongs to folks of the ilk of Patrick Stewart and William Shatner?

Indeed. But all that not withstanding, Mr McFarlane went ahead and pitched and sold his idea to the Star Trek Powers that be and the Fox TV network and created 2 seasons of very un-Star Trek like adventures, that really find their core appeal in the human (or alien as the case may be), stories they tell, primarily revolving around the crew.

But these stories are all interwoven with one of the better over-arching plots in the Star Trek world. I won’t tell you what that is, but it works its way slowly and subtly into fabric of the series and adds a real depth of a different colour to the goings on.

Because a few of the characters are a bit ‘eccentic’, a lot of people wanted to label this series as comedy or a satire. But I never saw it that way. Certainly there are moments of comic relief and Seth McFarlane’s character, for whom the Orville is his first command, is working very hard not to screw it up. But all this does is give the show some lightness to counterbalance the harsh reality that they are in the Star Trek Universe and that there is always some kind of weird shit going on.

Over the last two seasons, The Orville has wormed its way into my heart. Not so much as a guilty pleasure, because it lacks the tackiness of those, but as a personal favourite, and an opportunity to see a very talented comedic creative person put his own spin of some pretty classic sci-fi.

There is a lot of debate around whether Fox will renew The Orville for a third season, and I am firm in the belief that if they don’t renew it, it will certainly get gobbled up by any one of a dozen fat streaming services.

Here’s where you can see it now, because season two is done its first run and I don’t know if there are any re-runs.

Jim Murray is a writer, a reader, a sports fan and a TV watcher who has been writing about the sports & entertainment worlds since1998, which is when he created the Couch Potato Chronicles. Jim is also an ex-ad agency writer and art director and has run his own creative consultancy, Onwords & Upwords, since 1989. He lives with his wife in the Niagara area of Ontario, and works with companies that are trying to make a difference in the world.

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