After an absence of more than a year new episodes of The Orville returned to FOX this week. I never can understand why they do this, but the second season of the series premiered Sunday night however new episodes of The Orville will air on its regular night Thursday.
Most dramas on TV these days, the ones not on CBS anyways, follow the
model of the season-long story where each episode of the series leads
to the next. So if you miss one episode you’re probably not going to
understand the following one. However, much like with the original Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, in The Orville each episode of that show is a story unto itself where if you miss one episode you’re not going to be lost with the next.
What surprised me the most with the second season debut episode of The Orville entitled “Ja’loja” was how small it was. Most similar shows feature these massive, action-packed season
debuts meant to rope the audience back into the series. But “Ja’loja”
took completely the opposite approach. There wasn’t any action and the
episode dealt mostly with relationships. Be it between Capt. Ed Mercer
(Seth MacFarlane) and his ex-wife Cmdr. Kelly Grayson (Adrianne Palicki)
who’s dating someone new, Dr. Claire Finn (Penny Johnson Jerald)
dealing with her headstrong son, or even Lt. Alara Kitan (Halston Sage)
on a blind-date from hell.
The were no phasers blasting or ships crashing, it was all a pretty
typical day aboard the ship in “Ja’loja” which was actually kind’a
wonderful in how different it was from what could have been.
I suppose some of the reasons a show like The Orville can
get away with this is that it doesn’t those season-long stories to deal
with. And without that means there really isn’t any previous season
cliffhangers to come back to at the start of the season, so they can
afford to start a new season a bit differently than every other show.
I didn’t think I’d like these single story episodes after having been a fan of so many other series like The Expanse, Stranger Things or, to go way back, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But I really dig it with The Orville.
I like the idea that each episode is a story unto itself, and you’re
not expected to retain what’s all going on in the universe of the show
between episodes. Now I’m not saying that I don’t like season-long
storytelling since I really dig series that do that too, I’m just saying
that when done right single story episodes are just as satisfying as
season-long ones.
There’s not a lot of hope in sci-fi these days, and it’s been like that for quite a while. The ever popular Battlestar Galactica reboot, though it was an amazing show, was guilty of this, are most modern sci-fi series like The Expanse and Black Mirror too. Their themes seems to be that because present day is so cruddy,
surely the future will be cruddy too. And those shows have a point. In
the whole of human history there’s never been a time when mankind’s been
able to get over our petty disagreements and squabbles — which gets
reflected in our sci-fi.
That’s why I find the FOX series The Orville, created by Seth Macfarlane of Family Guy fame so interesting. In it, it’s a few hundred years in the future and
things are pretty great. We still have our problems, but they’re mostly
solved and mankind instead devotes its time to less destructive pursuits
like exploring the galaxy.
The Orville
Over the years MacFarlane hasn’t hidden the fact that he’s a huge fan of Star Trek, going so far as to have a small acting role in Star Trek: Enterprise. And his love for Star Trek shows in The Orville, which is the closest thing to the original Star Trek since the original Star Trek, even more so than Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Sometimes I think sci-fi’s “hopelessness” is because the creators of
sci-fi TV series and movies strive towards realism, and sometimes their
definition of “realism” is that dark=real. And that’s great, but things
don’t have to be “dark” to be real. Even the latest incarnation of Star Trek with Star Trek: Discovery is following this model where things are dark and dreary and the universe is a dangerous and forbidding place.
And I love “dark” — I’m a fan of The Expanse and Black Mirror and probably would be a fan of Discovery too if I subscribed to CBS All Access. But while there’s a lot of
series that show just how the future might be just as worse as the
present, there’s only one modern sci-fi show I can think of that follows
the mold of the original Star Trek series and says that the future will be bright, shiny and better than the present. And that show is The Orville.
The cast of The Orville
Originally advertised as a sort of “Galaxy Quest the TV series as brought to you by the guy who created Family Guy,” The Orville turned out to be a sci-fi show with a lot of heart and good intentions
about the crew of the ship of the same name as they explore the galaxy.
Not all episodes of The Orville are perfect, there’s a few clunkers in the first season. But overall I’d say that the first season of The Orville was better than the first seasons of things like The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine which is saying a lot.
There’s one episode in particular that I think surmises the first series of The Orville as a whole. As the ship zooms through space the Orville the crew are on the bridge all watching an old episode of Seinfeld and are trying to explain to an alien crew member why it’s funny. It’s a small moment in a show that has nothing to do with Seinfeld, but I can’t imagine this scene happening on any other modern sci-fi show, only on The Orville, which is part of the reason why it’s so special.
The Orville did well enough in the ratings that it’s been
picked up for a second season that’s set to start this winter. Now
whether or not the show was picked up because FOX liked it, or they
wanted to keep MacFarlane happy at FOX and not jumping ship like a few
other series creators did this year to other venues like Netflix or
Amazon Prime doesn’t really matter. Regardless of whyThe Orville got picked up, the fact is that it did get picked up made me very happy.
You have plenty of time on catching up on the first season of The Orville since the second doesn’t start until December 30.
It’s going to be a long fall. Usually, when the weather starts
changing and the nights start getting longer I look forward to staying
in and checking out the new series on TV. But this fall isn’t looking
too good. Sure, there’s a few things to watch, but not enough for my
taste and only a handful of series on network TV. The template the
networks have taken for the 2018–2019 season is to debut a lot of
lame-looking sitcoms and tired cop/hospital/lawyer procedural dramas
that all seem to have been done before.
The good news is it isn’t all bad, there are quite a few new
series on cable and streaming services to look forward to. The bad news
is that most of these series don’t start airing until much later in the
year and even then quite a few not until 2019. Oh well, there’s always
horror movies marathons come Halloween to fill the gap.
New series
The Passage
On FOX the vampire thriller The Passage starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar is set to put a lot of stakes into the
hearts of the undead ghouls in the one network show I want to check out
in January. While the novel the series is based on took place mostly in a
future overrun with the blood-suckers, this new TV show looks to moved
things back a bit to the pre-apocalypse when these vampires were just
being created in the lab.
Manifest on NBC about a plane that takes
off one day but lands five years later with everyone on board not
realizing the time-jump departs September 24. I think I’d be more
looking forward to this show if it didn’t look like a clone of many
other series before it, especially Lost.
Matt Weiner’s follow-up series to his uber-successful Mad Man entitled The Romanoffs is set to debut on Amazon Prime October 12. I’m not totally sure how
this one’s going to go, but reportedly this anthology series will focus
on characters who think they’re related to the Russian royal family the
Romanoffs.
After the animated Star Wars: Rebels series on Disney ended earlier this year comes the new series Star Wars Resistance also on Disney October 13. This one is set to take place around the time of the current film series but before the events of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Nightflyers
SYFY is once again trying their hand at traditional sci-fi series with Nightflyers,
based on the George R.R. Martin book of the same name. Not at all
looking to cash in on Martin’s name and the fact that he wrote Game of Thrones and therefore SYFY can promote Nightflyers as such, here, it’s the near-future and as the ship of the same name
explores the solar system it uncovers something that threatens everyone
abroad the ship. Nightflyers does sound a bit derivative of things like Event Horizon (1997), except that the novel the series is based on was written way back in 1980.
The Netflix series Another Life has an
astronaut (Katie Sackhoff) leading a mission to find the origins of an
alien artifact, but this artifact might be deadly and the mission
one-way. Maybe the cast of Another Life and Nightflyers can team-up since their two shows sure sound a lot alike.
The iconic comic book mini-series then film Watchmen will become an HBO TV series of the same name sometime next year.
There’s not a whole lot that is known about this one, other than
apparently it doesn’t totally follow the story of the comics but instead
takes place in the same comic universe.
And as for new shows this season, that’s about it. I’m sure I’ll
checkout some of those lame-looking sitcoms hoping to be surprised with
something interesting, but I’m not holding my breath.
Returning series
Fortunately, there are a few returning shows this year to look forward to.
The Good Place
Returning network shows that will premiere this year include The Good Place,
the sitcom about a group of people lead by Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen
Bell) stuck between heaven and hell returns to NBC on Thursday,
September 27 and The Orville on FOX that is Seth MacFarlane’s love-letter to the classic series Star Trek squeaks into 2018 with its second season debut on Sunday, December 30.
Two Netflix superhero series return this year too. First up is the second season of Iron Fist which drops September 7. Then, sometime later in the year, comes a third season of Daredevil who appear last season on The Defenders. I honestly don’t really remember what happened in the second season of Daredevil since it aired more than a year and a half ago at this point. Weren’t there lots of ninjas?
Doctor Who
Doctor Who returns for its 11th season of
the modern incarnation of the character October on BBC America here in
the US. The big news with Doctor Who is that after 55 years and
more than a dozen versions of the character, this time the lead will be
played by a woman, Jodie Whittaker. Personally, I still like Peter
Davison’s version of the character the best, no matter how many Matt
Smith fans out there I have to go all “Sharks and Jets” with.
The Sundance series Deutschland 86 will
return for its second season October 25. The first season was about an
East German spy played by Jonas Nay infiltrating West Germany in order
to steal military secrets and had tinges of The Americans to it. The third season looks to pick up three years from there and just a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The British sci-fi series Black Mirror will
serve up more creepy goodness sometime this winter on Netflix. Even
after four seasons I still really dig this show and I think it’s
partially because even though there’s already been those four seasons, Black Mirror is an anthology series so each episode is a story unto itself. And to
date there’s been just 20 episodes of it produced in total, which is
less than how many episodes of a modern network series are produced in
just one year, so the show is still fresh.
Star Trek: Discovery
A second season of Star Trek: Discovery returns to CBS All Access this January. The first season of Discovery got good enough reviews from Trek fans, if those were the only people seemingly watching it, and the
second season looks to bring in the big guns to the show, namely the USS
Enterprise along with its Captain Kir… errr… I mean Captain Pike (Anson
Mount).
The Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things will
return for its third season summer of 2019. Last time we left the
plucky kids of Hawkins, Indiana seemingly having beaten the evil forces
that had emerged from the “upside down,” but if other sci-fi shows have
taught me anything it’s that every victory against evil is just
temporary. Until the final episode of the series, that is.
My favorite superhero series The Punisher also returns to Netflix sometime next year. The first season ended with
Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) having totally accepted the mantel of the
skull wearing vigilante by blasting all the baddies to smithereens with
the second season looking to pick up from there.
The Terror
A surprise to me this spring was just how much I dug the first season of the AMC series The Terror about an ill-fated expedition to the Arctic the 19th century. The
second season will reportedly have a new story and focus on Japanese
Americans during the second world war since the first season ended with
pretty much the entire cast dead. That’s not a spoiler since the first
season was based on a real-life expedition that ended in tragedy and I’m
not sure you can consider a historical fact a “spoiler.”
A third season of the critical darling then critically derided True Detective will debut on HBO sometime next year four years after the second. The
third season looks to “one-up” the first since that told a story over
two time periods by telling a story over three.
Shows that I think will premiere sometime in 2019
Mindhunter
My favorite series of the 2017–2018 season , Mindhunter is set to begin its second season on Netflix next year. This show about
the creation of a serial killer hunting unit within the FBI in the
1970s was one of the most well-written and acted shows on TV in recent
memory. Plus the series is co-produced and had a few episodes directed
by David Fincher which is always a good thing.
The sci-fi drama The Expanse will leave its
home of three seasons on SYFY and move over to the Amazon Prime service
next year. The third season ended on a high note, so I’m extremely
excited to see where the show will go from here.
Another sci-fi drama, this time Westworld,
is set to debut its third season on HBO. Now, I won’t even pretend to
say that I understood what all happened in the second season finale of Westworld, I don’t think it was quite on the level of the final episode of Lost or anything, but I suppose time will tell.
I didn’t realize the TV series In Search Of… which was hosted by Leonard Nimoy had such a long life. I only discovered the show which originally ran from 1977 to 1982 in syndication when History Channel began airing old episodes of it in the 1990s alongside things like Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. But while there were just 13 episodes of the Arthur C Clark series, there were more than 140 of In Search Of….
In Search Of… covered everything in the pseudoscience arena, from UFOs, to ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis… and everything in between. Most of episodes asked a lot of questions but didn’t provide a lot of answers. Hence pseudoscience.
Ironically, where In Search Of… was an oddity on a channel in the 1990s that aired lots of documentaries and series about historical things, nowadays the simply titled History instead aires a lot of reality series like Forged in Fire and Mountain Men along with pseudoscience series of their own like Ancient Aliens. So I suppose it makes a lot of sense to reboot In Search Of… for a new generation.
Hosted by Zachary Quinto — who ironically like Nimoy also played Spock in Star Trek — this new 21st century version is essentially the old series all over again. The first episode covered UFOs and had the ubiquitous interview with three people who claim to have been abducted; one failed a polygraph test about his experiences, the other had an “implant” in a toe that turned out to be a rock while a third built a contraption so non-abductees can feel what it’s like to have that experience. There were also interviews with scientists too who were searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Spoiler alert, nothing found… yet.
There’s nothing new in this overly long and drawn-out at an hour 2018 version of *In Search Of…” that hadn’t already been done before 40 years ago in the old. Since we’re living in 2018 and not 1977 the questions I would’ve liked answered are — if we live in a world that’s increasingly being constantly recorded from security cameras outside businesses to cameras within people’s doors and if essentially everyone on the planet are carrying around cameras in their mobile phones 24/7, then why aren’t we recording evidence of UFOs and abductions on a regular basis rather than less than before? To me that would’ve made an interesting episode, not the same thing that’s been done over and over and over again for decades now.
So far the new In Search Of… is just that, a lot of looking but not a lot of finding.
Doctor Who “Shada” animated special
I don’t think people are ever going to uncover a “lost” episode of Star Trek. All of the episodes of that show that were ever shot have aired, are available in many home media formats and it’s not like there were any episodes that were aired once and never seen again. Sure, maybe they’ll find clips of episode or reels of henceforth unknown behind the scenes footage of DeForest Kelley eating a hamburger on the bridge of the Enterprise, but not a whole episode people haven’t seen in years. However, that’s not the case for classic Doctor Who series. That show has nearly 100 episodes that are considered lost that aired a few times but the original archival tapes either went missing, were destroyed or taped over.
Shada
But just because those episodes are lost today doesn’t mean that they won’t be found tomorrow. In fact just a few years ago a batch of episodes were uncovered in Africa. However, not all episodes like this can be found, case in point “Shada” which originally was set to air during the 1979–1980 season. That episode, written by Douglas Adams, yes, that Douglas Adams, was partially shot but never finished due to a work strike. So with “Shada” it’s the case of BBC having some completed footage but not enough for a whole episode. What they’ve done is to put together an episode that’s partially composed of these already filmed live-action elements as well as portions of the episode that were created via animation like “The Power of the Daleks from a few years ago to fill in these gaps.
“Shada” is interesting if a bit difficult to watch for a non-Doctor Who fan. In fact, I think even fans of the modern Doctor Who series probably wouldn’t dig “Shada” — Matt Smith obsessives probably need not apply here. “Shada” is difficult to watch partially because the classic stories were always a bit slow — there’s a part of the episode that features the Doctor and his companion taking a long, leisurely boat ride down a river — and also because the switch from live-action to animation can be quite jarring. Because TV shows aren’t filmed in order means that a character can be outside one second in a live-action scene and walk through door into an animated scene.
“Shada” is for die-hard Doctor Who fans only, and luckily since I’m a die-hard Doctor Who fan it means “Shada” is for me.
Killing Eve
Can I talk about Killing Eve for a moment? This series has won loads of critical acclaim and an Emmy nomination and was a show I was excited to see before it premiered. That was before BBC America advertised it into the ground for me. Before the first episode aired BBC America began promoting the show like most networks do for new and upcoming series. But they didn’t just promote it, they promoted it several times each commercial break. Which meant that every time I watched an episode of The X-Files or Star Trek I’d see ten commercials for Killing Eve every hour. Watch a few episodes of anything on BBC America and you can see why I quickly grew tired of Killing Eve before it ever aired. I can still hear that, “I have to kill you, I’m really sorry,” song echoing around in my head from hearing it so much on the commercials.
So I never watched an episode of Killing Eve. And again, it’s getting great reviews so it’s my loss, but I figured that once the first season ended in May BBC America would be done with it until next year. Except they weren’t/aren’t. They’re still airing promos for the show only this time telling views to “binge” Killing Eve this summer and ones congratulating Sandra Oh for her Emmy nomination.
I give up, BBC America, you win. If I publicly say that Killing Eve is the best show on the planet even though I’ve never seen an episode will you please stop airing commercials for this show?
