Post by B5Erik on Jul 23, 2021 4:15:03 GMT
The best Star Trek show in the last 20+ years isn't a Star Trek show.
Hyperbole? A silly comment? Maybe, maybe not, but there can be no doubt that The Orville wears it's love of Star Trek on it's sleeve, and the show nails the look and style of The Next Generation like no other show in the last 30+ years has. But Seth MacFarlane has added his own twist to the concept, making it uniquely his own.
No Star Trek show since The Next Generation has so boldly gone to the heart of what made Star Trek great as The Orvill has. Sure, Deep Space Nine was a great show (some people would argue the best Star Trek show of them all), but it borrowed heavily from ideas developed for Babylon 5 (another great show), and wasn't a purely Star Trek show the way The Orville is.
That's not to say that The Orville is a Star Trek ripoff. Well, OK, in many respects it is, but in others it finds it's own footing and carves out it's own path.
Show creator Seth MscFarlane is a lifelong Star Trek fan, and The Orville is his love letter to The Next Generation (and, occasionally, The Original Series). He found a way to take his quirky, sometimes crude, sense of humor and adapt it to Star Trek. Now, The Orville isn't a comedy, despite how it was promoted early on. Yes, it has a lot of humor, and yes it is often very irreverant, but it is played straight for the most part. The humor is added naturally, organically, and gives the show a more realistic feel, at times, than The Next Generation did. People are silly, people say goofy things, people crack jokes - people are funny (some more than others). The Orville plays on that, and exaggerates it ever so slightly. But the writing for The Orville never forgets to take the plots or the characters seriously. Camp this is not.
The stories have serious consequences. People die. The peril is real, and the situations are serious - except when they're not. But even in the more comedic episodes there are some serious plot points, and the show never becomes a spoof.
The writing is actually outstanding. It walks that fine line just before crossing over into campy spoof territory and then pulls back. MacFarlane and the other writers (including Star Trek veterans Brannon Braga - who has also directed a few episodes - and Joe Menosky) have found the right tone that can range from deadly serious with some occasional jokes, to silly stories with serious consequences. The humor can be midly crude, but it's kept mostly in check by television standards and practices. In fact, the humor on The Orville never crosses far beyond what The Original Series did on episodes like A Piece of the Action and I, Mudd. Humor was always a part of Star Trek, and that was often lost on the writers and producers of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine (although there were a handful of exceptions, including the amazing Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations). The Orville takes the humor from The Original Series and runs with it, making for one of the most fun and entertaining shows of the last 30 years.
The cast is exceptional as well. MacFarlane is outstanding as Captain Ed Mercer, as is Adrianne Palicki, Penny Johnson-Jerald, Scott Grimes, Peter Macon, Halston Sage, J. Lee, Jessica Szohr, and Norm MacDonald. Even the recurring characters are played brilliantly. The cast is a tight, cohesive unit, and it's impossible to imagine anyone else in those roles.
When it comes to a show being flat out fun and entertaining, nothing is better than The Orville.
