The Orville
Our Review
Seth MacFarlane’s love letter to Star Trek: The Next Generation — a deceptively faithful homage disguised as a comedy. The USS Orville, a mid-tier exploratory vessel in the 25th century, is crewed by MacFarlane’s Captain Mercer, his ex-wife as first officer (Adrianne Palicki, superb), and a writing staff that clearly pines for episodic, issue-driven sci-fi. The jokes are front-loaded in season 1 and fade as the show realizes what it actually wants to be: a genuine Trek-style morality-play engine.
By season 2 the show is doing straight-faced episodes about gender reassignment in a single-sex species, social-media democracy, and addiction. Season 3 (New Horizons) goes full prestige — the time-travel episode Twice in a Lifetime and the Bortus/Klyden marriage material are as good as modern Trek gets. The effects are feature-quality, the cast (Penny Johnson Jerald! Scott Grimes!) is game, and the earnestness critics mocked in season 1 became its greatest strength.
Verdict: Watch it. The Trek show that out-Trek’d actual Trek for three years.