My money's on the shut-in thing.

What is up with The Orville? Huh? Yes, I know we just talked about Star Trek yesterday and no, we're not going to just talk about TV shows from here on out. Fine, next time we'll talk about something that isn't politics, sci-fi or video games. I don't know, sports?

Did you us see the big sports game?
Yeah, me neither. Let's move on.

Seriously, Netflix, Hulu, we don't want
to die like this. I mean, we accept that we
will, but we'd rather not think about it.

So again, what's up with The Orville and why do I keep watching it? Oh, and I should probably explain. To catch you up if you have a rich, full social life or maybe if you just follow one of the other five or six hundred thousand streaming TV shows out there, and holy shit, incidentally, there are way too many TV shows right now. Dear streaming companies, please make fewer TV shows so we can catch up. Anyway, The Orville is a Star Trek-ish sci-fi/comedy TV show created by and starring Seth McFarlane. Yes, that Seth McFarlane.

Funny jokes, not at all similar to,
but distinct from the ones on TNG.

It started out as a more or less straight forward parody or spoof of Star Trek with the crew of a starship that's similar to, but distinct from The Enterprise, which is part of an organization that is similar to, but distinct from Starfleet and they go on space adventures that are similar to but-wait, no, actually they're just similar to the ones from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In fact, almost any episode of The Orville could have been a TNG episode but with jokes. Often funny jokes. I'm not always into McFarlane's humor, but this show is funny. Except when it's not.

And I don't mean a joke or a script that doesn't land, although that does sometimes happen. Like, a couple of weeks ago, Bortis, the Mr. Worf stand-in, broke the ship with malware from his porn holodeck program. It was...awkward.

Although in fairness, the holodeck on TNG
was 100% used for having sex with holograms.

The moral being that only idiots leave
important decisions up to random chance.

I mean that sometimes the show gets super serious. Which would be fine, like TNG got heavy a lot, almost all the time. But It's just a little jarring when we go from a blob voiced by Norm McDonald hitting on the ship's Doctor (played by Penny 'Cassidy Yates Johnson', who's great) to an episode about an entire species deciding how to choose which children to leave behind when their sun consumes their planet. Spoiler alert: they basically drew names from a hat. So yeah, like I said, heavy shit.

Some loser wasting time better spent
watching TV and then commenting
about it on the internet. Pfft...

For whatever reason though, it works, it shouldn't, but it does. I don't know if it's because the cast is likable or because the writing is good, but somehow the off-putting mix of Family Guy and Trek-inspired moralizing is oddly compelling. But then last week's episode happened, in which-hang on, spoilers. If you don't want this silly space comedy about holo-porn and unrequited blob-love ruined by foreknowledge of things to come, better skip the rest of this. Huh? I don't know, go outside, get some fresh air or something.

Although that might explain why
Judy wasn't in Season 5...

Still there? Great. Fresh air is for chumps. Ok, so last week the ship's robot crew member betrays everyone and he and his robot brethren take over the ship, phaser half the crew, blow up another starship and then they make Seth McFarlane watch as they chuck some poor schlub ensign out an airlock. I mean, Je-sus. This is followed by a 'splosion-filled space battle right out of Deep Space Nine or Star Wars with, one presumes, a surprisingly high body count for a comedy. Tonally it would be like if Urkel Bot went nuts and started murdering the Winslows.

Pictured: Dr. Finn having blob sex with
the snot monster. See what I mean?

Ok, maybe that's not the best analogy ever but it's weird, you know? One minute Norm McDonald's snot monster is cracking wise and the next minute the camera is panning through the burnt out hulks of spaceships and frozen corpses of spaced crew members in the show's equivalent of the Battle of Wolf-359. And then, in typical TNG fashion, the characters stare out into space and contemplate the mysteries and contradictions of what the hew-mons call love or whatever.

I don't know if the comedy is sometimes undercutting the drama or if it's the opposite. Like, is The Orville a serious sci-fi show with a sense of humor? Or is it a comedy with atypically high, often extinction-level stakes? Is it Star Trek with dick jokes? Is it good? Do I even like it? I don't know. And why am I watching it?

Because I'm a TV-addled shut-in and it beats getting up?