The Orville

[Lurkndog]

The Orville is Seth McFarlane's new sci fi show. It's a Star Trek clone, specifically Star Trek: The Next Generation... and it's surprisingly entertaining!

The best description I can come up with is that it takes the feel of TNG, the music, the clean optimistic future, and then fills the show with characters who like to tell jokes, and occasionally fail in humorous ways. It's like you made a 1990s Trek show with the cast of Scrubs.

And as a sci fi show, it works surprisingly well. It's not a spoof or a farce, it takes the settings and situations seriously. The humor comes from the characters joking with each other, and they use it sparingly enough that it doesn't ruin the drama. When things get serious, the characters get serious too. Then they tell a joke to blow off steam afterwards. The humor adds to the show, but doesn't make everything stupid.

Check it out Thursdays at 9 on Fox. I think the past episodes are up on Hulu.

[DrDominator9]

Have yet to watch the fourth episode but the third one was the strongest one so far. Topical, engaging and quite funny in selected spots.

[helstar]

I thought it was gonna be something different after the pilot episode (written by Seth). Following episodes have been a lot more serious than expected, so i don't think I'll keep seeing this...

[shevek]

Definitely need to check this out. So glad Trek is back in force (two shows).

[Mr. X]

I don't think Discovery is Star Trek. It looks good and the first two episodes are a good "movie". Visually its great. But its not Star Trek.

[TIEnTEEZ]

Seth MacFarlane is a huge Star Trek nerd. He can recite entire episodes of the original series from memory.
That being the case, I was really looking forward to seeing this show. And I guess it's okay so far. The one thing that's kinda getting me is that - I was under the impression that the show is supposed to be a comedy. I mean - it's Seth MacFarlane! So far it's been very serious and not really very funny at all. Even Norm MacDonald (as the voice of the slime creature) isn't all that funny. And I love Norm MacDonald.

[DrDominator9]

For me, if you don't anticipate the humor and just take it as a space adventure show It works better. I also feel the scripts are getting stronger as the series goes along. But I do agree the slime creature hasn't worked at all yet.

[Lurkndog]

This far in, I'm enjoying The Orville quite a bit, and I fell asleep in the middle of Episode 5 of Discovery.

Discovery would make a great Rifftrax. It's shiny, but oh so dumb.

[Femina]

Discovery forgot one of the primary tenants of Star Trek... which the Orville has not, and that's OPTIMISM. Star Trek often dealt with questions of morality and such but the jist was always that humanity had evolved beyond its greedy broken past.... if your Star Trek show is suddenly about the greedy broken dishonorable humans doing 'whatever it takes' to win for the greater good or whatnot... its not Star Trek.

[Dogfish]

Discovery forgot one of the primary tenants of Star Trek... which the Orville has not, and that's OPTIMISM. Star Trek often dealt with questions of morality and such but the jist was always that humanity had evolved beyond its greedy broken past.... if your Star Trek show is suddenly about the greedy broken dishonorable humans doing 'whatever it takes' to win for the greater good or whatnot... its not Star Trek.

DS9, which is the best Star Trek, would prove this wrong. Star Trek presents an optimistic vision of humanity, and what DS9 and Discovery have done is taken that optimistic vision and say, "Okay, let's see how you deal with this." With DS9 it was an existential threat to the Federation which, at one point, Starfleet attempted to defeat by committing genocide via a biological weapon. With Discovery it's more about the characters, for example the Captain is clearly a hard-charging hero type, but he's barely holding his shit together on a personal level. This is in contrast to, for example, Picard, who never gave a shit about anything he had to deal with, whether it was being munched by the Borg or Cardassian interior design. TNG was very generous in that regard, it never needed a compromise, the situations never asked for one.

[Femina]

Discovery forgot one of the primary tenants of Star Trek... which the Orville has not, and that's OPTIMISM. Star Trek often dealt with questions of morality and such but the jist was always that humanity had evolved beyond its greedy broken past.... if your Star Trek show is suddenly about the greedy broken dishonorable humans doing 'whatever it takes' to win for the greater good or whatnot... its not Star Trek.

DS9, which is the best Star Trek, would prove this wrong. Star Trek presents an optimistic vision of humanity, and what DS9 and Discovery have done is taken that optimistic vision and say, "Okay, let's see how you deal with this." With DS9 it was an existential threat to the Federation which, at one point, Starfleet attempted to defeat by committing genocide via a biological weapon. With Discovery it's more about the characters, for example the Captain is clearly a hard-charging hero type, but he's barely holding his shit together on a personal level. This is in contrast to, for example, Picard, who never gave a shit about anything he had to deal with, whether it was being munched by the Borg or Cardassian interior design. TNG was very generous in that regard, it never needed a compromise, the situations never asked for one.

I'm aware there's a rather sizable cult love of DS9 from the people who REALLY liked it... but its sort of where trek started to lose its popularity. Personally I never thought much of DS9 , and thought it wasn't in the spirit of Trek either. Didn't watch Discovery at all (Save for an episode here and there). I'd argue the reason Trek began to decline in appeal to the original Trekkies is that it began to lose sight of its identity and wanted to bleed into less distinctly 'Trek' areas of Sci-fi... that isn't to say DS9 or Discoveries depictions of the sci-fi future were necessarily invalid... just that they were losing sight of what identified Star Trek as Star Trek and not say... Battlestar Gallactica or something.

Personally, despite it's varying flaws, nothings felt more like Star Trek to me than the Orville since TNG... maaaaybe Voyager... maybe.

[Mr. X]

. just that they were losing sight of what identified Star Trek as Star Trek and not say... Battlestar Gallactica or something.

Ron D. Moore started out directing DS9 episodes so that's where that series got the BSGTNG vibe.

[Femina]

. just that they were losing sight of what identified Star Trek as Star Trek and not say... Battlestar Gallactica or something.

Ron D. Moore started out directing DS9 episodes so that's where that series got the BSGTNG vibe.

I guess that doesn't suprise me... To be fair, BSG was basically like... my favorite series ever... it's just that I never went to BSG to get my Star Trek fix. If I wanted EVERY series to be all pessimistic or 'humanity struggles with their demons' there have always and will always be at least ten shows/films running at any one period of time to fill that fix... optimism, on the other hand, is few and far between.

I feel like our generation is actually the worst in terms of having forgotten that its okay when escapist fantasy isn't as depressing as the Twelve o'clock news.

[Mr. X]

BSG had its moments. Like Rosalyn always willing to destroy rights for the sake of the collective and getting bitten for it every time. Or Baltar actually being the far better president. Yes it was not star trek. Sadly BSg relied way too much on soap opera and monkey wrench plots that made people way too unbelievable. Nobody is that messed up in real life.

[Dogfish]

Thing that got me about BSG was it was the only scifi series in recent times where it felt like the writers really sat down and thought about the ships and their capabilities and their combat tactics (although The Expanse has picked up the slack on this). There are scenes in BSG like the long pursuit, or the fuel raid in the first season, or the bucket drop and arrival of Pegasus later on, that are just freaking awesome. And they had that whole Das Boot vibe going on with the low tech rugged approach to the warship interiors.

By contrast ship combat in Star Trek is rarely consistent and rarely makes sense. They gave it a go in DS9 especially with the Defiant, but I suppose ship combat was never what Star Trek was about.

[Mr. X]

I disagree about BSG. BSG writers didn't seem to care about the tech all that much and you can tell by the lack of fans making models etc from the show.

[Visitor]

BSG had those plot points about a long pursuit and fuel raids in the original series back 3 decades ago. So all the writers did was recycle ideas from old scripts.

Star Trek did ship combat with a cloaked Romulan vessel based upon submarine warfare. They recycled ideas from war movies.

[Dogfish]

I disagree about BSG. BSG writers didn't seem to care about the tech all that much and you can tell by the lack of fans making models etc from the show.

They didn't use a lot of technobabble, but they had things like the flak screen, electronic warfare, nuclear missiles and so on that made sense and were internally consistent. They did it all on a very small budget too. Star Trek by contrast has never offered a sensible explanation for even its most often used trope, which is the ship gets hit and the console on the bridge explodes killing or wounding a member of the crew (whose name we don't know for some reason).

People don't make models of the ships and whatnot because it didn't have many, the Cylon ones weren't very good and let's face it a very large proportion of the fanbase will have looked at the ending and gone, "What the hell even was that?"

I mean I loved the show but I definitely lowered my level of fandom a few notches after the end. Apparently even the actress who played Starbuck didn't know what she was.

Moral of the story, when you make a sci fi series, always ensure you've got an endgame planned. :P

[Imagineer]

I love it when Ensign Goner's console explodes.

The Orville is an odd duck -- it defies storytelling convention in the way it combines humor and drama. Even in the latest episodes, some of the humor is slapstick and has to be taken as a timeout from the dramatic reality. The way the balance shifts from one episode to the next emphasizes the experimental nature of the show. I hope they find a way to make it work, because even with the challenges to suspension of disbelief it's a more enjoyable and less frustrating show than most of the scifi/fantasy series I've been consuming. And if they can't make the duality work, I hope Seth dials the humor down to fit entirely in-universe and settles into making some great Treklike sci-fi. Because we could use some more of that optimistic sci-fi.

[Mr. X]

Yeah I liked how the console exploded and the first officer asked where the fire suppression is and the security officer said THAT was the fire suppression console.

[shevek]

Maybe this thread should be retitled Orville/Discovery? I still haven't seen Orville yet but I'm up to date with the Discovery episodes. Yes it's darker and somewhat pessimistic and violent but I'm enjoying a few of the characters including Captain Lorca, and the various Klingons.

[ivandobsky]

I enjoy watching Orville. The main drawback is that i have to switch my VPN to the states to watch FOX, and the frequency of adverts stops being funny after a while.