RED ALERT! Billed as the spiritual successor to Galaxy Quest, Seth MacFarlane’s new show The Orville copy/pastes the Family Guy creator’s same old jokes and adds millions in effects. Let’s get this out of the way from the start. If you’re looking for this to be something like GQ the TV show, then you will be sorely disappointed. Wait for the Amazon reboot. The Orville is less GQ and more an attempt by MacFarlane to fulfill a childhood dream of being on a Star Trek show, which is great. He even utters a line about a boyhood dream not two minutes into the first episode. More power to him. But this isn’t a Star Trek show, and so the dream should take a form with its own direction and purpose. Instead, it’s Macfarlane’s usual shtick in space.
The Orville stars Seth MacFarlane (he also wrote and created the show) as Captain Ed Mercer, a talented starship officer who falls on hard times when he finds his wife cheating on him with an alien. Cue the first dick joke. Mercer is given one last chance to command a ship of his own, the titular Orville. To make it as contrived as possible, his ex-wife (Adrianne Palicki), also an officer, is assigned as his second-in-command. In the first episode, they’re sent on a uninteresting mission which becomes a battle ground between Mercer and the antagonist aliens known as the Krill.
2. Less Humor, More Character And Purpose
The Orville’s first episode just plods along. And while it has to suffer a little with introducing new people to viewers, it doesn’t have to be done in such an uninspired fashion.
All the characters are introduced in a lineup of lazy writing. “You are Character X, you’re species is known for this, <insert joke>” on to the next character. That’s about five minutes of the show as it goes character by character. Director Jon Favreau begins an epic pan around Mercer and Isaac, a crew member from a planet of AI lifeforms who thinks all humanoids are inferior. Isaac is a “racist” robot as Mercer puts it because MacFarlane can’t bring himself to be less doltish. As the camera pans around, the the characters talk about “racism” (which would be “species-ism” if MacFarlane were actually clever). There is an expectation to end the shot with a punchline. Instead, the shot ends, there is no real joke or purpose to it, and we’re on to the next scene.
The show borrows plenty from Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, it completely forgets that in the first episode, which is plenty cringe-worthy, each character is introduced with a bit of patience. And the characters get to SHOW who they are, not just tell us.
