My sister and I were at Comic-Con this weekend, and given that the crowds were somewhere between a North Korean May Day parade and Brigham Young’s family reunion, we didn’t get to see a lot of the big-time preview panels (like the Marvel movies panels) because of the lines. However, I did want to go to the Saturday afternoon panel for Seth McFarlane’s new project, The Orville. The panel host was David A. Goodman, a former writer for Star Trek: Enterprise who is now a producer for McFarlane’s cartoon, American Dad. He set the tone with introductions like “next is (Mark Jackson) who plays our racist artificial life form… he’s British, so he follows in a long line of great British SciFi robots like C3PO and- that guy who’s playing Superman now…”
The Orville is McFarlane’s first live-action vehicle for TV, where he plays Ed Mercer, a mediocre officer of a galactic navy, who is assigned command of a brand new starship. While it’s not exactly Down Periscope, Mercer’s professional reputation is such that he is assigned a “minder” as his executive officer, and this XO turns out to be his ex-wife, played by Adrianne Palicki. Which makes this at least the second time that she’s been cast as the tough ex-wife who gets on the ex-husband’s case.
Basically the setting is Star Trek: The Next Generation with the serial numbers filed off, much like Galaxy Quest (one guy in the audience said that the drive section of the Orville looked like an open toilet seat). And the theme coming from McFarlane’s team comes across to me like “If you were in Starfleet, what would YOU do?” For example, when Mercer needs a navigator for his ship, he looks up his old friend Gordon (McFarlane alumnus Scott Grimes). Gordon is in a holodeck combat scenario much like the ones Worf came up with in NextGen, with an exotic location, fighting a brutal ogre with lethal weapons. Except that Gordon programmed his ogre with a bright voice and friendly personality, and the three of them have a happy conversation until Gordon needs to leave with Mercer, so he distracts the ogre long enough to cut off his head. Which is half the premise of Westworld right there.
Yet, this series has some decent production values (about on par with Galaxy Quest), and serious Trek cred: in addition to Goodman, the show has Deep Space Nine actress Penny Johnson Jerald and NextGen producer Brannon Braga (who also worked with McFarlane on the Cosmos revival). The panel frequently described The Orville as a mix between comedy and drama or a “dramedy.” The dramatic aspect was not too obvious in the preview reel shown, but clearly the production is trying to create its own in-depth universe, one that clearly is inspired by the Star Trek properties but is meant to stand on its own. So while you could do disconnected absurd comedy scenes like the Marx Brothers or Monty Python (or Family Guy), that would defeat the purpose of a project with this much creative depth. It was emphasized that there would be an attempt to make the series work with both the comedy and serious elements, in a way that respected the genre.
That’s a tall order, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far.
Now, earlier in the day, I had seen the panel for Star Trek: Discovery, and I was also impressed with their producers and crew, including star Sonequa Martin-Green. And I don’t think it should be such a big deal that the star of the show is a black woman, or that there is an openly gay crewman in a relationship, or whatever. That sort of thing was baked into Star Trek from the beginning. Of course you had Uhura, and Sulu, and you had Geordi LaForge as a character with a disability. But you also had Chekov. I mean, half the reason they cast Walter Koenig was that they wanted somebody who looked like the lead singer of The Monkees. But the reason why they cast Koenig as a Russian was that Gene Roddenberry wanted to show audiences of the 1960s that in the future, Americans and Russians would be working together. And look- it’s 2017 and we have Russians and Americans working together now. Progress!
But while as a Trek fan I may want to see Discovery, CBS has decided to put it in their stupid “All Access” channel which is All Access only if you’re willing to pay for it. I’m paying too much for satellite as it is, and I don’t want to spend $5 or whatever for a network when I only want to see one program on it. So I am most likely going to lean towards The Orville for my (pseudo) Star Trek fix, since it not only has some respect for the genre but also gives it an attitude adjustment that I think it’s needed for quite some time.