The Orville Season 4: Seth MacFarlane Offers an Encouraging Update

By Jamie Lovett

The Orville's creator, Seth MacFarlane, offered fans an encouraging update about Season 4 of the show. While nothing is official, and Disney hasn't weighed in either way, creator MacFarlane says he's "cautiously optimistic" amid a turbulent time in the television industry. "The industry is in the midst of a time of upheaval and transition," MacFarlane tweeted. "I wish I could provide a definitive answer to your question.  At the moment, all I can say is that I remain… cautiously optimistic." In a recent interview, The Orville star Chad L. Coleman seemed similarly optimistic about the possibility of The Orville Season 4 getting an order.

"We're all in the loop and out of the loop. We think it's gonna happen, but it's still up in the air," MacFarlane told CinemaBlend. "There's so much going on with all of these studios that it's just like, 'Well, we gotta settle this thing first, then we can really decide on that thing.' A bunch of that is going on. We hope so. [Series creator] Seth [MacFarlane] has an amazing relationship with Dana [Walden] and with Disney, who's running it now. And they said they've had promising meetings, so we'll see."

Will The Orville Season 4 happen?

Fans are eagerly awaiting news on whether The Orville Season 4 will happen. In August, MacFarlane said he believed The Orville had a 50/50 chance of renewal, and he felt that new viewers binging the series on Disney+ could tip the scales in The Orville's favor. "My hope is that when the show drops on Disney+, the people who haven't yet discovered [The Orville] will suddenly give it a chance," MacFarlane told TVLine. "That's a potential game changer for us. I think that creatively and audience-wise, when people sit down and give the show a chance, it upends their expectations. The biggest burden with the show is preconceptions. People think it's one thing — there are people out there who think it's a sitcom —  and when they sit down to watch it they realize its something completely different. Once you get people's eyeballs on it, the show does the work, its speaks for itself, and people tend to be hooked."

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As for what The Orville's fourth season would look like, should the series get a renewal, MacFarlane called it a blank slate. "It's tough to chart what exactly what a Season 4 would be, because when we started writing Season 3, half the stuff that happened — the shifting of the Alliances, the Kaylon becoming an ally, the Moclans becoming enemies — I never could have predicted. It's just something that came about in the writers room over time. Certainly we set up threads this year, and most were pretty obvious, that lend themselves to payoffs in a Season 4, but how everything intertwines and evolves and develops…. I don't even know if we're picked up!"

The Orville is streaming now on Hulu and Disney+.

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