How The Orville Is Bringing Back Classic Star Trek-Style Television

Fans expecting Fox’s The Orville to be a straightforward satire of Star Trek have the wrong [...]

By Jamie Lovett

Fans expecting Fox's The Orville to be a straightforward satire of Star Trek have the wrong idea.

Creator and star Seth McFarlane isn't looking to make a parody of Star Trek, he's looking to pay homage to the franchise by telling new stories in the classic Star Trek style, but with more jokes. That's why the series' episodes run for 60 minutes instead of 30.

"If this were a half hour, it would be kind of cut and dry what this is," MacFarlane said at the Television Critics Association summer press tour. "Because we're an hour long show, the story has to come first. It can't just be gag gag gag gag gag. There has to be some reality to where the comedy comes from. If you break down where the jokes come and how they lay out, you'll notice there really isn't anything that exists in the Spaceballs/Family Guy realm. It all comes out of who the characters are that adhere to the reality of a science fiction world. Nothing ever goes into that Mel Brooks realm and that's by design. We really do see it as a sci-fi comedic drama. We allow ourselves room for levity in ways that a traditional hour long sci-fi doesn't. We're trying to break some new ground here. Whether or not we've succeeded is up to the viewers."

Critics who have seen the first handful of episodes noted that the tone shifts quite drastically, especially in the show's very serious third episode, but that is by design.

"The following episode is actually fairly light," MacFarlane said. "There's no pattern to the first three. One of the things I always look to as a Star Trek fan, there was an episode that was a big two part episode about the Borg. It was followed up the next week with a story about Picard going home to France to visit his brother at the winery. It was the same show and the stories couldn't be more different in tone. This is how TV should be. You should be able to write any kind of story each week and surprise your audience, but your characters remain intact and true to who they are."

What The Orville Borrows From Star Trek

And just like those previous Star Trek series, The Orville's episodes will be self-contained, episodic adventures rather than the serialized drama format that is so popular on television today that even Star Trek: Discovery will be using.

"The show is not serialized," MacFarlane said. "You can watch episodes out of order and still get a fulfilling viewing experience.

"That's something I kind of miss about TV. Everything expects me to invest in it since day one and we've lost that hour-long beginning, middle, and end except for procedurals, but that used to be how TV worked. If the characters are always the characters and they don't behave based on story, you should be able to tell different kinds of stories."

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What The Orville Borrows From Star Trek

One more thing Seth McFarlane is borrowing from Star Trek, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation, is its optimistic view of the future.

"I miss the optimism," he said. "I'm tired of being told that everything is going to be grim and dystopian, people are going to be murdering each other for food. I've had enough of that. I miss the hopeful side of science fiction.

"That kind of goes back to the roots of the genre. What can we achieve if we put our minds to it? That flourished in the '90s. Some shows did it in a more cheesy fashion, and others like Star Trek made it a little more legit, but that was the way to do a sci-fi show back then. Now things are very grim. That was a conscious choice because I miss that flavor of science fiction. It's a space that's waiting to be filled in this day and age when we're getting a lot of dystopian science fiction which is great. It can't all be The Hunger Games, a nightmare scenario."

The Orville premieres Sept. 10th on Fox.

(H/T SlashFilm)

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