When I first started this show I found it to be a really awkward mix of comedy and seriousness. It had some jokes thrown it at the most inopportune times as some kind of comic relief from a really serious situation. Perhaps the first half of the first season was actually a bit rough or maybe the show just grew on me, but by season 2 I found myself loving this show.
To me it seems as every bit as comfy, intellectually interesting and even funny as some classic Star Treks while still clearly being its own thing. I wish more comfy space shows like this would get made.
What are your thoughts on The Orville? Also I miss Alara.
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It was/is the best modern “star trek” thats coming out. Loved that you could see all the writers and seth were just huge trekies. The moral dilemma’s are almost always good. And the mostly episodic episodes are a huge bonus.
I would agree with you, until Star Trek Strange New Worlds. That show is fantastic.
Along with Lower Decks as well. The crossover to Strange New Worlds was great.
Lower Decks is fantastic, but it’s almost its own thing while still being a love letter to earlier Treks. It is obviously aimed at a different demographic while still being one of the best modern Treks. That crossover episode was almost all fan service, but there is nothing wrong with that every once and a while. It was a very fun episode. The end where the SNW cast was animated had me laughing, it was very well done.
Ive yet to watch it but ive heard good things.
I was in the same boat as you until recently. I was burned so bad from Discovery and Picard I just couldn’t go through it again. I heard all the good things, but still I just couldn’t get around to it. I’m so glad I finally did. I know there is some recency bias but I think I would go so far as to say Captain Pike is my favorite Captain now…
Damn it’s like you know me LMAO. I swear I will check it out soon.
I bet it was common in the Trek community. I guess the positive side is you have two seasons to be able to binge when you finally get around to it.
Renewed for Season 3!
It’s so good I didn’t even consider that not being a possibility. Glad to hear it though.
I find it to be very much the opposite, but infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
"oh yeah? Well, I’m gonna make my own Star Trek, with black jack and hookers. "
- Seth McFarlane
Star Trek Producer: “This guy is trying to out-startreck us” proceeds to make Strange New Worlds to retaliate
I’m pretty sure this is exactly what happened.
And you will not see me complaining. SNW is the best Trek of recent times.
Picard season 3 was pretty great too. I skipped season 2 as I hated season 1. Apparently season 3 just ignores the events of 2 completely because it was that bad.
It was shit wasn’t it, I heard season 2 was worse. I wanted to like it so much. What changed to make season 3 good? I’d love that to be true.
I don’t want to set your expectations too high, because it’s far from perfect, but I thought Picard S3 was basically the good TNG movie that we never received. It was great to see so many of the TNG crew back on screen, and probably for the last time together since they’re all in their 70s. The story was mostly good and there were some real high points.
I will definitely watch it then, thanks.
A 10 hour movie 🙄
So annoying the way all these shows are just stretched out into series when they can and should be a movie. And vice versa too, movies are all 3+ hours now I feel like, even friggin Indiana Jones was 2.5 hours, if you got that much to say just make it a miniseries or something jeez.
Now if you’ll excuse me I got some clouds to yell at.
I’d still say Orville hits the mark closer, in many ways. SNW follows some of TOS’ style, but it still doesn’t always quite have that Gene Roddenberry feel to the characters. Orville does this better while its style is more like TNG - which perhaps isn’t surprising given how much Seth MacFarlane has worked with Patrick Stewart in recent years.
Frankly I want more seasaons of both.
I never laughed so much in a Star Trek episode as I did at last Thursday’s episode. That was absolutely not expected lol.
I still haven’t watched it. I think I might be done with Trek. There’s just been too much damage in the last decade with those godawful jj abrams movies, discovery, picard, blech. It’s clear to me the franchise has moved in a different direction and we’ll always have tng and ds9, but I just can’t follow it anymore.
SNW went completely off the rails and became a CW science fiction show. It is not Star Trek and is so cringe worthy, it’s painful to watch.
I haven’t seen any of season 2 yet, and while I agree that a few of the episodes in the first season are a bit off-target on the science fiction aspects, I think they are overall quite a bit better than the first season of TNG. I’m more than willing to give it, say, 40-60 episodes to really find itself and get into the meat of the story they want to tell with it.
Every other episode is amazing then cringe, it keeps things light.
I loved it. I thought the actors did a great job with some of the more sensitive content. It was pretty generic in general, but I didn’t mind that. I like shows that don’t take themselves too seriously.
Better Star Trek than actual Star Trek.
Modern Star Trek, right?
EDIT By “modern Star Trek” I mean every show from Discovery to Strange New Worlds.
Ahhhhh Lower Decks came out between those two shows release dates and it’s a great show.
Yes I’ll die on that hill.
I just rewatched it’s namesake episode of TNG… it’s dark.
Yup, you got it. Fucking nutrek. That shit tier writing belongs in star wars, not star trek.
I watched the first 2 seasons. The “sitcom in space” parts work quite OK, Kaylon’s concept was somewhat interesting, space battles are well animated, particularly in the 2nd season which clearly got more budget, but…
Whenever the scripts stray away from “personal drama of the week” and dumb jokes about starships it becomes uninspired and shallow. It’s clear to me that MacFarlane tries to “dunk on both sides”. Sadly, his attempts at political/social critique look like “enlightened centrist” reddit rants which don’t try to think about broader consequences and context of points being made. To the point of some stories being somewhat problematic when dissected.
I watched the first episode of the third season to see where does the series go. It took a highly sensitive topic, again reiterated high-school philosophy arguments and made this potentially hard and relatable for viewers subject into an awkward bedtime conversation. I decided the rest of the season is not worth my time.
Luckily Strange New Worlds premiered soon after and I never looked back. SNW beats Orville on all measures.
Strange New Worlds Season 1 was great. Haven’t yet had the time yet to watch Season 2 but it looks just as good so far. Still haven’t started the final season of Picard yet, but I’m assuming you liked that one too? I thought it was good for a limited run series.
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what modern star trek should be
I expected the Orville to be a funny homage to Star Trek. For a short time it was just that. Actually a randy one with too much toilet humor. But then suddenly they became serious SciFi. Which I consider a bold move and mostly but not utterly a successful one. And in hindsight, it would have been hard to deliver good SciFi-Humor for more than one Season except if they went the Futurama-Path.
The part of the funny homage to Star Trek nowadays has been taken by Lower Decks. Humorwise it beats everything Orville had ever offered.
Orville is good. Not great but worth watching. They had some AMAZING episodes with depth and ideas among the best ST-Episodes. But they also had a lot of mediocre episodes. Still Better than ST-Discovery for sure. Even surpassing ST-Picard. Which is something Seth can be proud of.
Orville started when there was no Startrek and no serious Soap-SiFi at all (The Expanse is something different).
For me it is “Startrek when Startrek wasn’t” and basically revived the Franchise it wanted to make fun of.
I like it.
That actually sounds appealing when you describe it like that. I tried to watch it when it came out but it never delivered on the “funny”. It was just Star Trek but a little off.
Maybe I’ll try again or at least get past the first few episodes
I literally shed tears while watching the first episode because I didn’t realize how badly I needed new star trek that doesn’t suck. I just hit me right where I needed it to scratch that itch, and I was so overwhelmed. Also it made me hate even more what “real” trek has become. Huge fan, I didn’t realize season 3 is already on, gotta check it out.
Always thought the whole parody aspect was just a means to get funding to just make a regular star trek series in disguise. If someone would just give the man money for exactly that we would have an awesome star trek series.
It was the best Trek we had in ages. Held me over until we got SNW and Lower Deck.
I really hope we get another season because they REALLY hit their stride last season.
Pundits say there won’t be another season because he’s focusing on the Ted series. It’s supposedly doing well so no time for Orville
Thanks for the info, but that’s incredibly disappointing. Ted is probably my least favorite thing Seth has ever done…
It was the best Trek we had in ages. Held me over until we got SNW and Lower Deck.
Ditto. A real return to form, even if that form involved a lot of Space Wizards and other silly bullshit.
I honestly think the whole diplomatic triangle between the Planetary Union, the Krill/Moclan, and the Kaylon played out better than anything TNG managed. The Orville is easily on par with DS9 as one of the best sci-fi dramas produced to date.
Yeah, the Kaylon stuff with Isaac caught me off guard and blew me away.
I appreciate that they gave our characters more personal stakes in Teleya’s relationship with Ed and Isaac’s relationship with Claire.
I was initially turned off from it too because of the awkward comedy early on. But I have it another go and ended up enjoying it as an extension of Star Trek.
The vibe I get is he wanted to make a Star Trek show, but since he’s that comedy guy he probably got it greenlit as a comedy and then just slowly morphed into just Star Trek while the producers weren’t looking. I’m basing this on nothing, it’s just a funny head cannon.
It’s not a stretch to say it’s the only thing of this era that picks up the legacy of TNG trek. Lower decks is fun but too short to really do what full episodes could and while Strange New Worlds is ok… it still doesn’t feel in the spirit that I’m looking for.
The vibe I get is he wanted to make a Star Trek show, but since he’s that comedy guy he probably got it greenlit as a comedy and then just slowly morphed into just Star Trek while the producers weren’t looking.
This is actual reality, so you nailed it. Seth approached Paramount with a pitch for a nostalgic reboot of the TNG era, they said no, so he went to Fox who he had a great relationship with due to Family Guy and created The Orville.
Whether the producers were unaware of the slow transition to actual speculative fiction or not is unclear for the first few seasons. I think the final season shows that it was overt, however, since after changing networks the whole tone, production quality, and even the actual time length of the episodes all changed.
A “head cannon” is a big gun on your head.
It seems like a lot of modern star trek doesn’t appeal to OG trekkies, but as someone who didn’t watch anything pre-Discovery, I think most of it is pretty great compared to a vast portion of current TV.
Fair enough. It’s hard to watch them objectively without thinking about what we’re missing. What confuses me though is they new shows lean HEAVILY on nostalgia, suggesting that they’d be trying to get the audience that has nostalgia for it, but the rest of what makes up the shows isn’t anything like what made people originally enjoy Star Trek.
The Orville is my favorite Star Trek franchise. It’s canon - you can’t deny it. The Orville revived the Star Trek Franchise and gave it a pulse. It’s like blockchain. You can say it doesn’t belong, but it will always be there and nothing can change that. It has great attention to detail and decent story writing with that original “there’s a moral in this episode” that endeared ST in our hearts, something the newer ST franchises lack.
I loved it. So much sci if these days focuses more on world building than character development. Orville felt like it struck the right balance between the two and gave us characters that are easier to empathize with.
A good point. I feel like everything I watch now I just cannot stand any of the main characters. They’re either abrasive angry awful people that I want nothing to do with, or boring dull wooden textbook characters that are so cliche you already know what the plot will be before it happens. These days if I don’t like the characters within a few episodes, and care about what happens to them, I’m out.
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Try watching an episode in the second or third series. I’m not keen on Seth either but seems like the “Sethisms” toned down as the show progressed
I get the feeling that he was forced to include Family Guy style jokes in the first series and was allowed to ease up after it was clear that they weren’t working.
spoiler
With the exception of that early episode explaining humour to the android character and the engineer wakes up with his leg cut off. That was pretty funny.
That episode is still one of the most funny things ever and I will die on this hill
Man I totally forgot about that, that was fucking amazing! Love that show
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That take makes me think you haven’t watched much of the show
The Orville is the best science fiction show featuring complex moral questions of the last decade. And Seth McFarlane isn’t as prominent in the show as early episodes showed.
It’s much more focused on crew than other shows, specially Isaac, Bortus, Kelly and Claire. No surprise since they are better actors than Seth. I like Seth Krill episodes though.
The latest season of Orville has so much grey area and conflict in morals it makes TNG look pure black and white with no moral grey areas at all.
It’s really well done.
I had the exact same concern, before I watched The Orville.
After watching the first couple of seasons, I think The Orville actually does a pretty good job honoring Star Trek’s tradition of raising difficult questions and calling for more empathy in the world.
You clearly haven’t watched it at all lol.
I’d describe it as a more irreverent version of a Star Trek universe with more realistic interactions among peers on the ship. A place where instead of it being an idealistic utopian society where everyone is a driven, passionate genius in their field, they’re just people with jobs, have normal messy social interactions, and also sometimes deal with really big important political and military situations. They’re capable members of the crew, but they still fuck around with their buddies like real people do. I find it refreshing, compelling and endearing. I love the Orville 90% of the time.
I love it, the gags and semi-coherent plot in the first season pulled me in and I was hooked after that. I understand Seth’s humour can put some people off, that’s fine too but I think the show is strong enough and has matured enough to stand side by side with modern Trek and hold its own.
