The Orville is not more Trek than Trek.

With the release of the third season of The Orville, the discussion among some people who love these kinds of shows (nerds like me) has often boiled down to: "It's good to have Star Trek back." The thing is...The Orville isn't Star Trek, and trolls like to use this line to bludgeon the legions of new fans who absolutely love the diversity and woke-ness of new Trek as if (in doing so) we don't know what proper Trek looks like or (for that matter) everything was better when women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people were shunted into minor roles.

For me...The Orville always seemed like it was a kind of love letter to The Next Generation. This is similar to Michael Chabon's take, whose Picard series seems like an unnecessary addition to the story of Picard. Don't get me wrong...it's Trek so I watch it. But there's very little in the unfolding of the twilight years of Jean-Luc that feel like new ideas. There is no Species 10C like we got in Discovery. There are no strange new vistas that I haven't seen before. Instead, the majority of season 2 of Picard just spent its time in Earth's past in a deep dive into nostalgia and perhaps rewriting what the Borg were/are, which just seems unnecessary.

The Orville is also filled with a lot of ass-hattery and dick jokes. Even though I did think they were funny, dick jokes are not a sustainable thing you can do with a show for season after season. McFarlane clearly acknowledges this as they tapered off quite a bit in the first season and then became a more serious show when they introduced the Kaylon in season two who wanted nothing more than to wipe out all organic life. The mountains of skulls on their home planet were anything but funny (pure horror, folks).

The reason why The Orville could never be more Trek than Trek is because it relies too heavily on psuedo-nostalgia with everyone looking and talking and reminiscing about all the great things they never experienced during the world as we know it today. The haircuts, the slang, the worldview. You even get the 1980-2000-ish playlists, which seems like a crutch to draw in viewers who hate on anything new and different that takes a chance with its content. The far future should not always hark back to the distant past, and this type of thing is on the verge of becoming a science fiction cliché. Regarding the comedy aspect, it's not well-defined. The show goes from a dramatic futuristic show with awkward comedic aspects that oftentimes come across as half-hearted attempts sandwiched between serious situations. Some of it makes me cringe.

Where the show does tend to succeed is by using the exact copy of the playbook of ALL TREK: hope and human foibles. This takes its shape in watching humans struggle to answer questions to which there is no answer, and watching people do their best work together and to try and solve problems with the help of others. Along the way, they create unity, support, and communication. That message is something that we need now more than ever in our society, because it's a struggle out there. Y'all know what I'm talking about here.

I'm looking forward to watching The Orville season 3. However, it's not more Trek than Trek. If you are one of the people saying this, I wish you'd stop.

The Orville has turned into Star Trek the Next Generation.

When I first started watching The Orville, I got the impression it was going to be a tongue-in-cheek version of Star Trek: The Next Generation much in the same vein as the "old" movie Galaxy Quest. However, that's not what we got. In the second season, I was really struck by this when the show invested so much time with Bortis (and the complications of his alien species and their view of sexuality), and then it went straight off a Borg script by turning Isaac (who is a Kaylon diplomat) into the equivalent of Locutus of Borg by having him be instrumental in restoring order to The Orville and thus having a hand to play in the high stakes battle to save Earth from annihilation.

That it is a love letter to Trek is no secret. McFarland has long waxed poetic about Trek, and he probably launched The Orville to give fans something to watch who felt spurned by the fact that Star Trek: Discovery (also in its second season) is behind a paywall. As a side note, I do love and look forward to Star Trek: Discovery far more than I do The Orville (which usually waits on my DVR until Sunday before I watch this week's episode, whereas I watch Star Trek: Discovery the moment it is available). For me, Star Trek: The Next Generation was never good enough, but it had those Borg episodes that just kept me on the hook. The Borg were a fantastic villain and foil for the Federation.

To explain a little regarding my comments on The Next Generation, I didn't really like the episodes where Picard plays his flute because he spent an entire second lifetime learning about an alien race that implanted in his head a memory so that someone would mourn their passing. It was good and I'm glad I watched it, but I have no desire to see it again. Sacrilege, right? I didn't really like the episodes where we saw what it was like to serve on a starship as a member of the lower decks. In other words...I didn't like all the slow stuff. I didn't like all the hours and hours of character building or the conversations in Ten Forward. I liked the action, the times when the Enterprise faced off against the Borg, or when the Enterprise was involved in a horror-like mystery with high-stakes implications. I also like serials, i.e., when the story continues and evolves with each passing episode. You only get that in "To Be Continued" episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and by extension, The Orville. But its in every single episode of Star Trek: Discovery.

I guess this puts me at odds with some Trekkers out there who dislike new Trek (I guess that's as good a reason as any to appeal to a new audience and discard the old). It also makes sense from a money-making point of view. Tastes from young people are quite a bit different from those who grew up in the eighties (I seem to be an exception because my tastes align with a much younger crowd). Some of the older Trekkers (my peers) are vehement in their complaints with things like, "Look at what they're doing to Spock!" and "Klingons don't look like that!" and the list goes on and on. They say things like, "The makers behind Star Trek: Discovery are going to cut their nose off to spite their face and alienate their base." Eh? Not really. This so called "base" is a lot smaller than those who are whining about Star Trek: Discovery would care to see. CBS All Access hit its money-making goals one year ahead of schedule, because of Star Trek: Discovery. And its eye-popping subscription numbers are behind launches of "All Trek, All the Time" on the app going forward.

New viewers, I think, are more aligned with things people (like me) desire. For example, I'm the World of Warcraft player that enjoyed raiding and instance runs more than standing around in cities, conversing with others and crafting things to be sold on the auction house. I love action. I love fighting and doing things. I'm not so much into exploring, unless exploring means that there's a fight I can participate in (and demonstrate skill) in a previously unexplored area. I'm the perfect "Diablo" player where there's combat and then magic items. In other words, fight and then reward and rinse/repeat.

This translates into my diet of television a lot. In my opinion, The Orville rocked it strong when it made the Kaylon into villains and played down the humor by substituting in some serious drama. Then they just kept adding to the pile by having the Orville crew discover huge tunnels filled with the bones of an entire race that the Kaylon annihilated in order to throw off the chains of their enslavement. Then of course was the assault on Earth, which had a dramatic battle that was every bit as epic as the one that took place at Wolf 359 in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I like that kind of stuff, and as long as I get it in doses...I'll probably keep watching because I'm on the hook. The formula is probably ten parts boring episodes and one part exciting one, and then you've got me.

But I love Star Trek: Discovery. No episode is boring. It's like Game of Thrones. Everything is serial and builds on episode after episode. The production values make every single episode look like a movie. The acting is incredible, and there's enough odes to the old stuff that it hits all my pleasure buttons. I'm so happy it has been renewed for a third season, and I'm pleased that there are going to be five more Star Trek series that get launched behind the CBS All Access paywall. Those are going to be so good. All Trek, all the time. And (at least as far as my tastes go) the producers seem to know what a viewer like me wants. "Give me Game of Thrones! Give me The Expanse!"

I do feel sorry for you Trekkers out there that want The Next Generation back, and I'm glad you have The Orville. I like the nostalgic feel of The Orville too. There's a lot that reminds me of the nineties, and it's more than just McFarlan's periodic speckling of the dialogue with eighties music and old movies. However, I'm also grateful that the things that I like are being catered to by people in the entertainment industry, and I like my space opera with lots of action and things happening and high stakes. I want it in every episode if possible, hold all the filler please :). And yes, I'm willing to pay for it outside of cable.

The Orville is basically a polished version of Star Trek minus any dignity

Dignity is probably over-rated anyway. If you disagree, you probably won't like The Orville. I, however, did end up liking it quite a bit. Living modern seems to lack all kinds of dignities these days. Even minus a president who will say anything that comes to his mind, we have a culture where it is no longer considered "crossing a line" to just ask people how much they make or spent on something (even if you don't know them), to ask them if they masturbate, or to air entire arguments between couples on Facebook (or for that matter broadcasting it on Facebook Live) So The Orville seems particularly timely because it does all of those things, refusing to back away from its crew needing to "take a piss" or from talking about a messy divorce that's broadcast over the loud speakers. Truth be told...I don't particularly like the fact that nothing is taboo in our culture anymore. For one, I kind of liked it back when people had manners and said "thank you" or used the word "please." But it is what it is, right? Maybe all the grossness of life being aired like it is on reality television is the remedy for a culture that (otherwise) might tend to glamorize life. It's the "anti-glamorization" movement so to speak. And I think it found a good representative in Seth McFarlane.

Seth is an interesting guy. A creative genius he no doubt is, but he also seems to have some incredible clout with Fox. He was the one that got Neil deGrasse Tyson's reboot miniseries of Cosmos to get made, and it doesn't surprise me that Fox clearly threw a huge budget behind The Orville (as well as giving it a coveted Sunday night air time). The powers that be seem to love Seth McFarlane. The Orville looks very slick and polished too. It has a big budget feel to it, putting to shame any Star Trek series's special effects that I've seen to date. We'll see how this fall's Star Trek: Discovery measures up. However, I have a feeling though that they'll be fairly comparable as far as visual effects go. I just hope Star Trek: Discovery is more nuanced, takes itself seriously, and has a slower pace. I miss a slower pace guys...everything these days seems to be made for people with attention deficit disorder. With The Orville, I felt a little breathless as every scene seemed to be jam-packed with action.

As far as an homage to Star Trek goes, I liked it a lot. But The Orville does go where Star Trek never did: it dared to poke fun at it's own crazy ideas. We get introduced to an invention which has the ability to create a bubble of time wherein everything else inside that bubble gets aged a hundred years. As a scientist points out...the implications are huge in that you could grow crops in a single night for a city of starving people or other similar uses. But they use it to age a banana into dust and to grow a redwood tree mixed with tardigrade DNA (so that it can survive in space without food or water) to destroy a spaceship. It works but again...without much dignity. It's funny of course. I just wonder how long they can keep it up before the slapstick becomes kind of tedious. Can you imagine the reception audiences would have given forth if the "Genesis project" had been treated with such abandon?

And this makes me beg a question to the public at large: is a theme of space any fun over a long haul when it is done tongue in cheek? Humor kills drama, and drama is the bread and butter of any traditional one hour television show. Would Law and Order have any of its impact if all the scripts were performed in such a way as to be slapstick and without dignity? I'm not sure that it would. So it'll be interesting to see how my feelings toward The Orville develop over the course of the season. Will they deepen or will I be glad to see it go?

Anyway, what did you guys think of it (if you watched it)? Are you going to continue with the show on Sunday night? Or did it just rub you the wrong way? I'm looking forward to reading your comments.