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.
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.
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 why The 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.
