The Orville Renewed for Season 3 at FOX

Fox has officially renewed Seth MacFarlane's The Orville for a third season. The sci-fi series is MacFarlane's love letter to Star Trek with a comedic bend.

The series is set 400 years in the future and follows the adventures of the USS Orville. The vessel is a mid-level exploratory spaceship with a crew of humans and aliens. Together they face the wonders and dangers found in outer space, as well as the more mundane issues that come with everyday life on a starship.

Seth MacFarlane created The Orville and stars as the ship's captain, Ed Mercer. The cast also includes and Adrianne Palicki Cmdr. Kelly Grayson, Ed's first officer and ex-wife. Other cast members include Penny Johnson Jerald, Scott Grimes, Peter Macon, Halston Sage, J Lee, Mark Jackson, Chad L. Coleman, and Jessica Szohr.

The Orville is now considered a contender for the Emmy Awards. MacFarlane told Deadline that the original plan for the show was to be more of a comedy, but that may have been a subconscious cover story to make the show he really wanted to create.

"When we began this, it was designed to be a little bit more of a hybrid, straddling the line pretty evenly between comedy and drama," MacFarlane said. "I have been a big sci-fi fan since I was a kid. I think secretly that was the show I wanted to do, but I figured there's no way in hell anyone would swallow that from me."

MacFarlane thinks going with the darker tone for The Orville was the right decision. "With an hourlong show, in order to sustain it, you have to have real stakes," he said. "That was my fear at the beginning. If people aren't with us on that side of it, we're probably not going to last very long. But they were, so we really leaned into that."

The Orville built up its mythology in its second season, introducing new enemies in the Kaylon that forced an alliance between the Union and former foes the Krill.

Are you excited for a new season of The Orville? Let us know in the comments.

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