Give The Orville And Its Tedious & Confused Take On The Final Frontier Some Space

Even hearing for months on end that The Orville as a TV show had a more serious tone than its heavily comedic ads would suggest didn't prepare me for what a tonally odd creation it is. It's trying to actually be a new straight-up science-fiction program that heavily homages Star Trek to a fault but it's also one with recurring comedic elements that just don't work at all. If the attempt here was to make something either as comedically strong as Ted or as thoughtful & exciting as the best elements of Star Trek, then the folks behind The Orville have miscalculated greatly and wound up with a science-fiction equivalent to Seth MacFarlane's major movie misfire A Million Ways To Die In The West.


Though The Orville is a more serious creation overall, like that 2014 feature film, The Orville plants Seth MacFarlane, a talented voice actor and singer but not an especially proficient guy when it comes to live-action acting in stuff that isn't Logan Lucky, in an underwritten lead role while deriving its comedy from having its characters that exist in a typically more stylized medium of storytelling (in Million Ways it was Westerns, here it's science-fiction) speak in a more realistic manner sprinkled with modern pieces of lingo. I have no clue why we needed to borrow the style of that specific underwhelming motion picture but The Orville does just that while bringing its own set of unique flaws to the table.

Specifically, its attempts to play things more serious as a straight-faced science-fiction show just don't go very well mainly because the characters either come off as forgettable or as just weak retreads of notable Star Trek creations (we've even got an alien crew member whose facial features are clearly evocative of the Klingon's while having a temperament straight of the Romulan handbook). It's hard to get all that dramatically invested in these characters like the show clearly wants you to when the entire story hinges on a tired jilted ex-lovers plotline that has Seth MacFarlane's Captain character paired up with his ex-girlfriend played by Adrianne Palicki.

Poor Palicki is saddled with a role devoid of any notable personality as she's basically around to be a repentant former lover to the protagonist, while the various supporting characters, as said above, don't fare much better despite one being played by Scott Grimes A.K.A. the voice of one of the best character on Amerian Dad!, Steve Smith. At least the tepid adventure the cast goes on in this pilot episode leads to the appearance of some aliens brought to life with some nice makeup effects, though it's disappointing the look of the antagonists Krill aliens are basically just a yellow version of Krall from Star Trek Beyond.

Those nefarious aliens come in quite late into the 44-minute running time of this episode and the elongated length of the show may be one of its biggest problems. There are too many dialogue heavy scenes in this episode that are tepidly directed and acted (two of the worst of these kinds of scenes revolve around Scott Grimes character) that just make the pacing of this debut episode of The Orville a total nightmare, it just feels like they're padding this thing out so it can be an hour-long drama for some reason. On a storytelling level, the pilot of The Orville is a total wipeout and may even be the worst thing Jon Favreau has ever directed, though the fact that Favreau also directed the upcoming pilot for Young Sheldon means that there's a good chance The Orville won't hold onto that title for much longer...