The Orville

I've had "The Orville" on my "to watch" list for quite a while. There aren't many new SciFi series and it didn't have many episodes released, so I finally found some time for it. The verdict after is similar to most of the other opinions I found online - it's probably what you'd expect to see in a "Star Trek" series (well, at least if your "first contact" with ST was with TNG, DS9, Voyager, or even with Enterprise or the original series, and not with the more recent ones). I don't think that limits though the potential audience. And that's because "The Orville" has something of its own: the humor.

It stands clear from the first episode that "The Orville" starts as a parody of the classic recipe for a SciFi series, where we have an exploratory ship going bold into space "where no one has gone before". It's probably something to expect given that it's a series created + partially also written by Seth MacFarlane, in whose CV you won't find much stuff beyond the comic genre. Moreover, here he's also taking the part of captain Ed Mercer, leading a crew who seems more fit for a sequel of "Galaxy Quest" (another parody following the same pattern, for who still remembers it). It takes a while to get the interesting part, which gets more obvious as you advance in season 2 = the themes of the episodes start becoming more seriouse, even philosophical sometimes. If my first impression was of some easy comedy set in outer space, I definitely can't say that anymore after two seasons.

Indeed "The Orville" has its own specific humor, which you have to like. Otherwise, it might seem that it disregards some subjects. Actually, it's probably the perfect way to avoid getting into the area where life is seen either in white, or in black, sometimes derailing into some wannabe lessons of right and wrong. Unfortunately that seems to be a common trend lately, and "The Orville" has its own share of episodes trying to teach you some morals, but stil it doesn't dismiss the grey area. Even if sometimes it's present only as a discreet nuance, it's there, and the humor somehow helps keeping it.

Not long ago I wrote about the first season of "Star Trek: Picard" and I was saying it's much better than "Discovery" (at least compared to the first five episodes, because I couldn't handle more). Still, not even "Picard", for its first season at least, wasn't a Star Trek in it's "classic" sense, where the majority of the episodes were focused on a separate subject, even if we had elements of a global story arc. From that perspective "The Orville" is much closer to what Star Trek once was, possibly also due to including in the production team some ST veterans (Brannon Braga - one of the main writers from TNG to Enterprise, Jonathan Frakes - Riker from TNG, directing here some episodes, and others).

To conclude, I don't think I've seen a SciFi series structured like that since "Stargate: Atlantis" incoace, and even though in general I prefer a series that follows a more complex and continuous narrative line, which is obviously more engaging than stand-alone episodes, I still felt the need for something more "light". And what I can say until now is that "The Orville" seems to fill perfectly the place of that.