It’s Not Just a Star Trek Homage (Anymore)
There’d be no Orville without Star Trek, that much is obvious. But despite the similarities, The Orville has managed to distinguish itself from the sci-fi giant that came before (and is still very much boldly going). “It’s this genre that emerged in the 1930s, of a ship in space, captained and crewed very much the same way that a sailing ship was,” MacFarlane told io9 at the beginning of season three. “It’s something that dates back a lot of decades. Star Trek was really the first to take it and turn it into something that really mattered and was a serious form of storytelling. You know, for us… sci-fi right now is very dark. It’s very dystopian. It’s very grim in a lot of ways. It’s very cautionary. And the optimistic, uplifting part of that genre is something we haven’t really seen in a while. So there was a pretty obvious open pocket for us to kind of slip into when we started. How we fit in now is—it’s really up to the audience, I think—what we’re bringing to the table in tone, in structure, in scope, is in a class of its own.”
