Whoa, a lot of people die in this sneak peek of The Orville's next season

The Orville: New Horizons is set to debut on Hulu on June 2

By William Hughes  |  February 5, 2022 | 10:07pm
TV News The Orville
Whoa, a lot of people die in this sneak peek of The Orville's next season
The Orville: New Horizons Photo: Michael Desmondl/Hulu

The Orville—as we’ve noted more than once while covering Seth MacFarlane’s loving homage to Star Trek, formerly at Fox—is a conceptually weird show. On the one hand, it remains a vehicle for MacFarlane’s distinctive sense of humor; one of its first scenes ever involved an officer requesting the right to drink soda on the bridge of a starship. On the other, it genuinely wants to operate as a faithful riff on Star Trek, especially from the Next Generation era. (Including pulling its own riff on that show’s classic “The Best Of Both Worlds” in its second season, with a plotline in which hostile machines wage genocidal war on all organic life.)

All of which is to say that there’s very little to laugh at in a just-released sneak peek at the show’s new season, New Horizons, which MacFarlane released on social media this week. Instead, the opening moments of the new season are mostly concerned with a pretty nifty looking space battle, as the Orville itself swoops through a stellar battlefield, trying not to get blown up. After a few show-off-y cuts into and out of the ship’s windows, the camera eventually settles on B.J. Tanner’s young character Marcus, racing through the ship to try to get to his younger brother Ty. It’s all a lot more “space-based horror movie” than “comedy about people who happen to live in space,” is all we’re saying.

MacFarlane accompanied this bummer of an opening with some news that will also be less than ideal for fans of the show: It turns out that New Horizons—which will mark the series’ transition over to Hulu—has been delayed, and will now begin airing on Thursday, June 2, 2022. The season began filming back in 2020, but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Norm Macdonald, who voiced a character on the series, reportedly finished recording all of his lines for the season before his death in 2021.

 
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