Is the Orville Supposed to Be Funny

The Orville sure looks amazing. Set on a sleek spaceship in a galaxy far, far away, the new Fox show spares no expense on its sweeping space vistas, the prosthetics of its alien crew members, the sleek weaponry, the gorgeous foreign planets teeming with otherworldly life. But examining The Orville a bit closer quickly reveals a show that might as well be about a band of enthusiastic cosplayers — including creator and star Seth MacFarlane as the ship's cad captain, and Adrianne Palicki as his second-in-command and ex-wife — shooting through the cosmos and yelling "pew pew!" as they brandish imaginary space lasers.

Lest that sound like good wholesome fun, let me stop you right there: The Orville is not, as it turns out, the Galaxy Quest-style spoof Fox has been selling in its ads. In fact, The Orville isn't particularly funny at all, both by design and accidental ineptitude. Instead, it's a bizarrely straight-up homage to Star Trek that can't seem to admit as much.

The Orville, earnest and hopelessly scattered, makes for one of the most perplexingly conceived new shows I've seen in a long while. (I've watched the first three episodes.) So in the interest of service journalism and potentially saving you hours of your precious life, here are the four most confusing things about the show — plus one bonus thing that is unfortunately not confusing at all.

1) The Orville is Star Trek fanfiction that will not (or cannot?) acknowledge that it is Star Trek fanfiction

Thanks to some combination of pride and copyright laws, The Orville's blatant recreation of Star Trek is one the show can't actively express. Instead, it becomes something like an open secret.

When confronted with the striking similarities between the two shows at this summer's Television Critics Association press tour, MacFarlane spoke vaguely about how both The Orville and Star Trek "sprang from a lot of different sci-fi tropes that came before." He chalked the similarities up to The Orville following in the footsteps of Star Trek's "forward thinking, aspirational, optimistic place in science fiction." He talked about his love of Star Trek while carefully tiptoeing around outright admitting how much he borrowed.

But watching even a single minute of the show makes MacFarlane's inspiration obvious. From the Orville crew's uniforms, to the Klingon-esque "Krill" alien species, to the episodes fading to black at every commercial break, The Orville is, as my colleague Todd VanDerWerff puts it, just "Seth MacFarlane filing the serial numbers off Star Trek."

To be upfront: I am not an avowed Trekkie who can pinpoint all the ways in which MacFarlane's Orville rips off its obvious predecessor. For such an analysis, please turn to Indiewire's Liz Shannon Miller, a lifelong Trek fan who was so appalled by MacFarlane's brazenness in borrowing both Star Trek's signature characteristics and several producers to create his own version that she concluded The Orville is "creatively, morally, and ethically bankrupt."

There's no way Fox nor MacFarlane feel similarly. To them, The Orville is an homage to space shows in general that just so happens to look an awful lot like Star Trek, with the extra element of that certain, cynical strain of comedic takedown that's brought both parties so much success .

The problem with this thinking is that The Orville is not just a Star Trek ripoff — it's a Star Trek ripoff that has no idea what to do with its own sense of humor.

2) The Orville is neither comedy nor drama

Things are very intense, until they're not, until they are, until they're not, until —

Fox

This is the part that will immediately perplex most viewers, who will undoubtedly tune in to The Orville — a heavily advertised show from the creator of Family Guy — expecting a comedy that sends up space show tropes and lets MacFarlane do his dick-joke thing. But The Orville isn't interested in being that at all, instead swerving between plodding sincerity and sporadic MacFarlane-style snark so aimlessly that the show might as well be walking in drunken circles.

On one side of this unbalanced equation is the optimism MacFarlane referenced at the TCA tour, which sees the Orville's bumbling crew leading heroic missions in which they learn valuable lessons about love and life and all that emotional jazz. On the other are the jokes — to the extent you can call them that — that pop up randomly and ineffectively, like they're straining to break free of the show's stubborn chains. Every time The Orville starts to settle into something resembling a rhythm in its Trek replications, MacFarlane will spit out some reference to 20th-century pop culture — despite this show taking place [vague mumbling] years into the future — or some variation on "what a bitch my ex-wife is, amirite?"

It's almost impossible to know whether there are too many jokes in The Orville or too few, both because the show doesn't seem at all confident in whether it should even be making jokes at all, and because the jokes that are in the show are bad.

And speaking of bizarre choices:

3) The Orville is an hour-long show for no real reason

Okay, that's a bit misleading: The reason is almost definitely that Star Trek was an hour long, so its pale facsimile must follow suit, as it does in all other matters.

But there's no doubt that The Orville would be better off as a half-hour comedy, if only because it becomes clear halfway through the first episode that MacFarlane has no idea how to fill out a full 40 minutes of broadcast television. Scenes drag on for minutes beyond their natural endings, and by the third episode, different combinations of characters just start having the literal same conversation twice.

The moment that convinced me this show doesn't know what it's doing was halfway through the pilot episode, when I figured I had a few minutes left to go, based on how the story was unfolding and how MacFarlane tends to operate, only to discover I had 20 minutes and zero wine left.

4) The Orville's earnest attempts at social relevancy clash with MacFarlane's typically glib style

He tried.

Fox

MacFarlane said at The Orville's TCA panel that he is genuinely hoping the show can take advantage of sci-fi's endless potential to reflect society back at itself. That's a noble goal, and one that every sci-fi show should at least consider when building out its world. But the way MacFarlane does so in The Orville is, to say the least, mystifying.

As has now been reported, an upcoming episode of The Orville takes on a "very special episode" structure to debate the merits or lack thereof regarding — stay with me now — an alien baby getting sexual reassignment surgery.

Without getting into the specifics of the story, I can at least tell you that the way this episode plays out makes it one of the most transparent and least necessary takes on the vast complexities of gender. The episode, written by MacFarlane, clearly thinks it's shedding light and nuance on a fraught topic; it's unclear if MacFarlane, a straight cis white guy, consulted anyone other than himself on said topic. But I would be shocked to discover that was the case, since the episode just ends up reciting bullet points too simplistic even for the transgender Wikipedia entry, and letting characters exchange the same basic arguments in scene after excruciating scene.

Of the episode, MacFarlane said at the TCAs that "if you're doing a science fiction show and you don't go into those areas, I don't think you're doing your job." That might be true — but going into this area wasn't his job to do.

Bonus round: The Orville's existence is the least confusing thing about it

Despite all this, I'm not at all surprised The Orville got made. Of course it got made.

It's a sleek space show from Seth MacFarlane with enough jokes that Fox could cut a trailer reminding MacFarlane fans why they liked him enough to stick with him for almost two decades(!) of Family Guy and his ensuing animated empire. And to that point, MacFarlane has stuck with Fox for almost two decades — seriously, time is a joke — and made the network millions upon millions of dollars through programming and merchandising alike. Getting Fox to greenlight his elaborate, expensive space fantasy could have been MacFarlane cashing in a particularly big favor, or Fox throwing a bone to one of its most prolific and profitable creators. More likely, the answer is both.

It's too bad The Orville itself didn't turn out to be worth the trouble, but as far as Fox and MacFarlane are concerned, the show being good might be beside the point, so long as they both get what they want from each other.

The Orville premieres Sunday, September 10 at 8 pm. Y ou can't say I didn't warn you.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/9/8/16267782/the-orville-seth-macfarlane-review-lol-what

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