Orville - Old Wounds

[Karha of Honor]

I'm not as harsh as Chuck on the humor, it's not great (Though the "Now can I come to work in shorts now?" joke actually did get me laughing). I won't say the humor works - especially for me the more sit com esque bit. "They are exes, but they must work on the same ship" feels trite, and tends to make Mercer look petty.

I will agree that McFarlane is a really bad lead for this show though.

But on the topic of tone, the show I think about when watching the Orville is Stargate SG1. Stargate was WAY sillier than Star Trek, but not to the point where the show undercuts its drama so much, and I sort of feel that its a point the Orville could stand to aim for.

Shoot me i love the blue alien ejaculating with his head at the start. It's ruined now because i just watched the review, not the series.

[BunBun299]

I must admit, I totally grok The Orville. I do. The way I explain it is to talk about my grandfather. When I was a little girl I would sit with him and watch war movies, he liked naval ones. The Gifthorse, The Cruel Sea, Enemy Below, you get the idea. His absolute favourite though, and mine too, was Operation Petticoat. It is theoretically a serious war movie; at one point a party of celebrating sailors and civilians get strafed by a Japanese fighter squadron, but it is also a movie where Tony Curtis steals the wall of an admiral's office, smuggles a pig in the officers head, and they save the day by flushing a bunch of lingerie out a torpedo tube. That latter part; it is because they are being depth charged by a friendly vessel which has not recognised them and that attack is treated as a real threat.

On tv we used to watch "gritty" cop shows that I was entirely too young to be watching. There was The Sweeney, The Professionals, well, much the same thing. Lots of violence and adult themes. I don't remember what my Grandfather's favourite cop show was at the time, but I do know what mine is now. It is New Tricks. It deals with really nasty murders, some of children, which are dug up by a cold case squad composed of retired police officers from the 70s and 80s. And they play pranks on each other, set up gags, someone gets their tie stuck in a chocolate press or after a visit to a hypnotist clucks like a chicken. They also deal with police corruption, institutionalised racism, the aforementioned brutal murders, and the team's recovering alcoholic falls off the wagon over the course of an entire series and is forced to rehab at threat of divorce.

I grok the Orville because I grew up with movies where comedy and drama both coexisted in the same entity. And that is how I see The Orville, and I do not feel ashamed of that. I think it works, and my favourite episode of the series is the one which everyone picks on as the worst, the Social Media World episode, because I can see that while there are jokes there is also a real nasty streak of darkness in that episode which is ever more reflected in the real world now.

Anyway this episode? It is Standard Season Opener #1. It introduces the cast, the ship, the world setup, and it includes some action and jokes as it goes. It is fine. It does its job. I liked the redwood tree ripping the much bigger and meaner ship apart, that was an awesome visual, much better than a lot of the more militaristic SF shows approach of blow it up or technobattle out of it, and reasonably well set up. I enjoy this show as a good comedy drama show.

As far as the Trek part goes, yeah, these are not the top of their game people. These are the just good enough at their jobs to avoid getting fired people, and if it were a Trek episode these would be the guys who Kirk and co were called to rescue at the start of a Trek episode. They are not getting on the fleet flagship, and they are not getting fleet flagship level duties, they are getting the scutwork; and we all know people like that at our own workplaces.

Majority Rule is my second favorite episode of the series, after Krill. It really felt like a Trek style allegory episode. And I thought it worked really well as a commentary on modern social media. How judgemental people can get without even learning all the facts.

[thisithis]

If sfdebris did some homework he would find out that Fox back then was under control of an asshole named Tom Rothman who went to war against everything Sci-Fi. he killed shows like Firefly and so on. He is now working for Sony starting with some of the worst train wrecks ever made like Passengers witch flopped and The Emoji Movie. but we are talking about a man that new fantastic four films would be better than Deadpool. That Deadpool promo that got leaked was meant for Tom Rothman, and after seeing it Tom turned down the Deadpool film. The film was revived by James Cameron after getting into a fight with Tom where Tom called Avatar a shit fest and that it would bankrupt Fox. Turns out that Tom's fantastic four did and was saved by Deadpool. So I'm not shocked that Fox would end up approving Seth MacFarlane new Sci-Fi show The Orville.

By the way, the title of the show The Orville is a play on words for what we call women's reproductive organ. Or a woman's ovaries or a woman's eggs if you want to be blunt about it. But then again StarLord's father showed up in a giant egg in Guardians of the Galaxy 2. But anyways, I found this show at least be better than say Star Trek: Discovery even if seemed like The Orville was being run by frat boys, which was way lot better then Star Trek: Discovery and StarGate: Universe seemed to run by complete dumbasses.

What kinda world do we live in where Seth MacFarlane has a better Star Trek show then the people running Star Trek is right now???

[Ghostdraconi]

To me Orville is a decent Sci-Fi show weighed down by bad comedy, every time I find myself getting into the show they break out the "comedy" and it just pulls me out of it.

[Koshundheit]

Just putting this out there. Seth MacFarlane has said that season 2 of Orville will be heavier on the sci fi and lighter on the humor, which will make a lot of people happy (but will probably lessen my enjoyment of Bortus as a counterpart to the silliness).

http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/seth-macfa ... the-sci-fi

I don't mind silliness mixed in with seriousness -- my favorite fantasy series by far is Discworld, which does that a lot. But few writers have as deft a hand at it as Sir Pterry did.

Leaning more into serious is fine by me. The show was fun as-is, but going for fewer jokes while focusing on ones that really work sounds better than a joke a page when most of them felt forced. Still, I'm also hoping the comedy that remains regularly involves Bortus. Just thinking about the scene where he was about to sing "My Heart Will Go On" and got interrupted makes me both chuckle and curse the show for leaving me to imagine that. Not in reference to the aspect of his race, but he makes a perfect straight man for comedy.

I'm eagerly awaiting the show's return. Meanwhile I haven't managed to get through even the first episode of Star Trek: Disco, even though I somehow got through every episode of Voyager and Enterprise, including their finales, more than once.

[jadenova]

And Seth MacFarlane made his own version of 'Star Trek' with blackjack and hookers.

[Robovski]

And Seth MacFarlane made his own version of 'Star Trek' with blackjack and hookers.

Basically, and put himself in the lead, for good or bad. I quite like it, I feel the initial reviewers didn't understand it's old Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off and has an older style sensibility to drama - variety. It's a drama with comedic elements and not the wacky comedy in the promo trailer Fox was running.

[CareerKnight]

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this observation but when I first saw the Orville itself my first thought was " Did the Sophons make that?"

[BunBun299]

Sometimes I wonder if the people who makes trailers have any clue what the show/movie they're advertising is even about.

So, fellow Orville fans, while we wait for the next season, or review, which ever comes first, whose up for a nice game of Latchcomb?

[Aotrs Commander]

Haven't watched the review for the simple reason that I only caught - to my annoyance - the last eight episodes of the series and I do actually want to watch the first four properly, at some point.

But, having now watched the last 2/3ds of the series - I really quite like it. As pretty much EVERYONE has said, the humour is hit and miss (though to be honest, I found a few more hit than miss, but I found McFarlane's early Family Guy stuff funny, so...), but otherwise - it's very solid. None of the characters annoy me - that's always a good start. Alara, Isaac and Bortus are great. I actually like Mercer, too.

There's an odd sort of mix of childishness balanced by competance as well, with the crew. (But to be fair, they often actually end up dealing with the conceqeucnes of their stuipidity when they do something silly.) What Orville reminds me of is what would happen if you made a series out of someone's not-quite-Trek roleplaying group. The "PCs" as it were have that sort of at times very genera savvy and crisies management, interspersed with Antics That Make The GM Facepalm. And I actually rather like that.

Definitely the weakest episode was the - to use what you folks have said above - was the date-rape episode, but some of the others (like Firestorm, the penultimate one with Alara) was really, really good.