The Orville Star Adrianne Palicki Shares Bad News on Series Return

Adrianne Palicki doesn't have the most optimistic update about The Orville. In the latest episode of Michael Rosenbaum's Inside of You podcast, Rosenbaum asked Palicki about The Orville by leading into the question about the series being one that she's currently part of and she quickly replied "No, no longer doing that" before elaborating that she doesn't know the show's Season 4 status and explaining that the show is very difficult to film as an actor.

"I don't know, truly, the answer to that. I think there's talk that it could possibly be something that certain people want to do, but it's a really difficult show to shoot, man. We shot 33 episodes in six years," Palicki said. (via TVLine).

"It became an actual issue because there would be so much time in between in between seasons because Set [MacFarlane] wanted to write everything himself. So, it would just take so much time. At one point, we were like we have to fight the studio to give us a holding fee or something. J. Lee was eating saltines and Gatorade at one point because we just couldn't afford anything. It was horrible."

Has The Orville Been Renewed for Season 4?

At this point, The Orville has not been officially renewed for a fourth season, though 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 it's something completely different. Once you get people's eyeballs on it, the show does the work, it speaks for itself, and people tend to be hooked."

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!"