The Orville Gets an Encouraging Update From Seth MacFarlane

Seth MacFarlane has offered an update on the future of The Orville. The Orville fans have received mixed messages from The Orville's cast lately. Adrianne Palicki said she's done with the show, confirming that the cast's contracts have expired. While that seemed like bad news for the show's future, J. Lee later made some cryptic social media posts that some fans took as a good sign about the possibility of The Orville returning. Seth MacFarlane and Scott Grimes spoke to TVLine recently. While they primarily discussed the new Ted series, they also touched on The Orville's future, with Grimes revealing they'd been heading in an encouraging direction before the strikes hit Hollywood.

Grimes said, "right before the strike, it feels like we were going to announce a Season 4." Whle that didn't happen, Grimes said, "I think it's a better than good possibility that we get to do this again. This is [Seth's] little child, he loves to do The Orville, and it'd be a shame if we didn't get to do one more season. So, I would say that I'm optimistic. That's what I would say."

MacFarlane added, "I'm trying to remember what the exact, well-worded politic statement was that Hulu put out… All I can say is the same thing that Hulu said, which is the show is not dead. Nobody has told me that it's dead from the network, so we're proceeding under those auspices."

Will The Orville Season 4 happen?

Following the release of The Orville: New Horizons onto Hulu, and then additionally to Disney+, 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."

As for what The Orville Season 4, MacFarlane said it would be 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+. The Ted series will debut on Peacock on January 11th.