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PILOT REVIEW: The Orville

THE ORVILLE









Starring: Seth MacFarlane, Adrianne Palicki, Penny Johnson Jerald, Scott Grimes, Peter Macon, Halston Sage, J. Lee, Mark Jackson

Created by Seth MacFarlane
Written by Seth MacFarlane, Directed by Jon Favreau

One reason I seriously considered ending this blog this summer was how uninterested I was in the new fall shows after seeing the trailers during Upfronts. One trailer that looked particularly bad was The Orville on FOX and I'm sorry to say after seeing the show, the full version of Seth MacFarlane's vanity project is not much better.

Set 400 years into the future, The Orville is clearly a send-up of sci-fi shows, most obviously Star Trek. But it weirdly straddles between being a spoof of one of those shows and actually being a legitimate sci-fi show. This weird hybrid gives the show a very odd tone. The show would bounce between a silly argument between two characters that used to be married and then the characters would find themselves in a life and death situation. The reason it didn't work is the funny parts weren't all that funny and the serious parts were hard to take seriously because it was a silly show half the time.

The funniest part of the entire episode was actually the opening when Ed Mercer (MacFarlane) walks in on his wife, Kelly (Adrianne Palicki) cheating on him with an alien. The exploding alien actually made me laugh and made me hope that maybe this show was going to be better than I thought it was. But the laughs ended there. Introductions of the Orville crew was clearly meant to be funny but fell quite flat. And the ongoing battle between MacFarlane and Palicki in the midst of a crisis got really old really fast.

From a sci-fi perspective, I really can't comment since I watch so little of that genre, but I have the feeling that sci-fi nerds will not find this enjoyable or creative. The decent cast doesn't rise above the material. As I said, this seems like a vanity project for MacFarlane and I don't find him all that funny in general. The strongest performance came from Adrianne Palicki, who was poised and charming. Scott Grimes was pretty annoying in the best friend role while Penny Johnson Jerald wasn't given enough to do. I didn't expect to like this show but I always try to keep an open mind. This one met my expectations.

WILL I WATCH IT AGAIN?
Even with no other new shows premiering for a couple weeks still... probably not.
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