This feels like a bone they threw to McFarlane because he’s given them some hits. If it takes off, great. If it doesn’t, well, they indulged him.
To be 100% fair, I sat there wondering why the heck I was stuck watching the Broncos beat the snot out of the Cowboys instead of them cutting straight to the show. I guess this avoids the issue in the future. Maybe.
Yeah, I’m happy for all shows to move off Sunday since football tends to ruin everything.
Not as much as the World Series though. Feckin sports.
Only a 10% drop in viewers (and 3% drop in demo) for episode 2.
Nice! We have a hit on our hands! Let’s see how it does on Thursday. Hopefully the audience will move with it.
Yes, to be fair to FOX, Sunday night has a tendency to have schedules impacted by football, plus Sunday night fall TV is already jam packed with hit shows all over the place on other networks. The move to Thursday puts The Orville in a time slot that is unlikely to be impacted by sports (except the World Series maybe once) and where competition is far less entrenched already.
I enjoyed the second episode for the most part. The one thing that bugs me most about this show is it’s insistence on using 1990’s-2000’s era slang and references when it’s supposed to be 250 years in the future. Kermit the Frog? Sweet? Reality TV including Real Housewives, Bachelor, etc.? It’s jarring and kills suspension of disbelief every time.
I watched a live Punch & Judy show with my kids this weekend, over three centuries after the debut of the characters.
Kermit the Frog has been a popular character for well over a half-century with no signs of him going away anytime soon… him still being thought of fondly in two hundred years is the most believable thing in the whole series. :)
Yeah, it seems like they haven’t quite made up their mind if this is satire, spoof, or semi-serious/tongue-in-cheek. I wouldn’t mind any of those approaches, but the inconsistency is a bit annoying at times. Still, it’s been a decently fun romp thus far.
I concur with this. It ends up giving things an overly campy feel.
That omelet joke at the beginning had me in tears.
See, that came off as horrifically insensitive to me in the context of the conversation. But I loved Jeffrey Tambor as the dad full of medical advice.
That’s what made it so funny!
That scene made me laugh out loud. Even 250 years in the future moms are still disapproving of ex-girlfriends and dads are still full of oversharing on the medical advice. Plus, who doesn’t love a Jeffrey Tambor cameo?!
I’m still going to watch every week because the characters are growing on me and I like the look and feel of the sci-fi parts. I do also laugh at various scenes and one-liners, so I don’t want them to cut the comedy all together, I just wish they’d figure out that the show is best when it’s mainly sci-fi with a touch of interpersonal situational comedy. Maybe they do after a few episodes…so it’s worth sticking around to find out.
So I caught up on this via my woefully under-used Hulu subscription over the last couple of days.
I think I generally am liking the scifi element decently well; while the plots thus far feel very TOS/TNG rip-off-y, I love that kinda stuff and am happy to see it finding a place on TV again. It feels like there’s some fun bits of worldbuilding going on, but without too much care for consistency just yet, which is more in keeping with a comedy. . .
. . . but man, the comedy bits are just falling flat for me. I’m not sure if it’s the acting or the writing, but everything seems very telegraphed as “Now is when we tell the obvious joke / say something inappropriate loudly / reference the 90s” and they consistently feel pretty stuck-on to me.
I think more solid comedic timing might help, but it’s also been a long time since I found a MacFarlane show especially hilarious, so it could just well be that I don’t mesh with his brain so well.
If anything, I’m a little surprised at how consistently straight the back half of Episode 2 was played. The closest comparison I can find probably is Firefly, which also never really caught my eye, but wouldn’t be a bad level to shoot for, IMO.
At the end of the day, though, I’m liking what I’m seeing a lot more than what I figured this would be when it was first announced (I assumed we’d be getting Family Guy In Space), so I’m onboard, Thursday or Sunday :)
The humor is the biggest problem with The Orville. Not that it shouldn’t have humor but in Firefly, the humor flowed naturally and always felt consistent with the characters style and attitudes. In The Orville, a lot of the humor is jarring and yanks you out of the world they seem to want to build. It just feels a bit out of place at times. Hopefully they can find the right tone but for now, while I like the show, it just doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be.
Funny how jarring everyone is reporting the humor to be, given Seth MacFarlane’s usual talent for subtlety. #theresyourproblem
Yep. The characters feel like vehicles for jokes right now, but admittedly, not clear if maybe there are deeper characterizations coming that will do things like make me better able to accept the Captain as a buffoonish accidental racist or what have you. But and large, like a lot of other MacFarlane-fare, they seem to think of a “joke” and just shove it onto whichever character hasn’t spoken in awhile,with a few genres going to a particular character (e.g., Stewie gets all the “Oh I might be gayyyyy” lines).
All of which might be tolerable–not great, but tolerable–if the jokes were being put forward with an ounce of charisma or timing. I think of the sort of deadpan, rote delivery between the helmsman and navigator when they comment on things like the dog licking itself; it’s already a little unnecessary to call out the extremely obvious sight gag, but when they do, it’s just so joyless and lacking in craft.
The guy playing the Moclan 2nd Officer is probably the best of the bunch so far, insofar as makeup is probably helping his straight man act. He’s also got the most solidified characterization thus far, compared to, say, the supposedly racist robot who said one rude thing in each episode and mostly otherwise was just helpful and intellectual and entirely bland.
I really sound like I dislike this show, but it’s mostly the limited humor I find uninspiring. Luckily, there’s less of it than I figured there would be!
I had a lot of problems with the second episode. The humor can be so jarring – I wish it was presented in universe more like Firefly. The B plot acting-commander apparently learns what… you should give in to peer pressure? Orders from the Union are terrible? (A nice precedent to set in the first real episode.) Why not tell the Union you have a species on board they will talk to?
The reality television secret weapon was good though. I even liked the plan that failed about another Zoo already owning them. That was genuinely clever and seemed like it could work.
Me three. I’ll watch the Super Bowl most years, an NBA game or two if the Blazers are playing and it looks close, and a few World Cup games every four years. Otherwise I’d thank sports not to interrupt my damn shows.