The Orville: Seth MacFarlane Offers Season 3 Update

The third season of The Orville is still a priority for creator and star Seth MacFarlane. Still, fans will have to be patient as the production team figures out how to navigate filming during the coronavirus pandemic. That was the message in the update that MacFarlane offered during a Q&A session with The Orville actor Jessica Szohr. “All I can say is we’re working on it,” MacFarlane said of the new season, which will be the sci-fi comedy’s first to debut on Hulu after making the jump from FOX. “We’re working very hard. We got hit by this just like everyone else, but we are working on it.”

“We will be back soon, folks. There has been a lot of speculation online: Will the show come back? The show is still a huge priority for me and for the cast and everyone else. We do have a season to finish, and we are going to finish it. For a show with a lot of prosthetic makeup that requires close contact, a lot of background artists, it’s a big job, and you want to make sure you do it in a way that keeps everyone safe and secure. Once we have those protocols figured out, we will start up again and you will get more Orville.”

MacFarlane said in a statement announcing the move to Hulu, “The Orville has been a labor of love for me, and there are two companies which have supported that vision in a big way: 20th Century Fox Television, where I’ve had a deal since the start of my career, and FOX Broadcasting Company, now FOX Entertainment, which has been my broadcast home for over 20 years. My friends at the network understood what I was trying to do with this series, and they’ve done a spectacular job of marketing, launching and programming it for these past two seasons. But as the show has evolved and become more ambitious production-wise, I determined that I would not be able to deliver episodes until 2020, which would be challenging for the network. So we began to discuss how best to support the third season in a way that worked for the show. It’s exactly this kind of willingness to accommodate a show’s creative needs that’s made me want to stick around for so long. I am hugely indebted to Charlie Collier and FOX Entertainment for their generosity and look forward to developing future projects there. And to my new friends at Hulu, I look forward to our new partnership exploring the galaxy together.”

The Orville Season One and Season Two are streaming now on Hulu.