Season 1

Once you accept just how much this show is going to rip off, and blatantly steal from Star Trek (notably, it seems to fashion itself around The Next Generation and Voyager), you can sit back and let yourself have fun with it. It mixes up all of the sci-fi tropes which 1990s TV gave us and adds some low brow humour which works more often than not. The show is certainly still finding its feet, but its been well cast and each of the actors involved contribute very nicely.

Out of everyone, the standouts from this season have Alara, Bortus and Isaac - and its a shame that they haven't each been given a bit more screen time. Of the three, Alara has been the one most allowed to grow and Halston Sage really does well when given the lead. Isaac has been fun and intriguing, but I feel like so much more could be done with him. Meanwhile, Bortus has just about stolen every scene he's in so it's a shame that he's not been given more episodes.

This is certainly a show for those of us who really miss 1990s science fiction TV, because it aims to tickle the nostalgia but also cleverly makes fun of so much of it (eg., Malloy looking out of the viewscreen at a nebula and remarking it would make a great desktop screensaver). The humour is also balanced quite well with more serious and heartfelt material, although I feel there is still work to be done in this regard. On the plus side, the show has managed to surprise me with unexpected twists from time to time.

One thing I'm not so much a fan of is the Ed/Kelly relationship. We kept getting teased that they still like each other and honestly it's felt like a dead end to me from the start, so I'd appreciate it if the show would leave it alone from now on. The season finale suggested that this would be the case going forward.

If the show felt like taking some influence from Deep Space Nine - the best Trek - that wouldn't go amiss either! A little more consequences for the ending of episodes, sharpen up some of the humour and this show is going to be an absolute winner.

For once, I got a terminating decimal average rating for a season: 6.5

I'm going to buck my own tradition and not round this one up to a 7. There's just too much that needs improvement. The humor doesn't really work in this format, and it's mostly low-quality jokes anyway. Almost none of the stories have a satisfying dramatic structure—whether due to rushed resolutions or lack of depth, there are never any stakes.

Star Trek developed (or at least, its spin-offs did) a wonderful way of getting the audience to believe that something could go wrong, that we really might lose one of our beloved characters if things didn't go just right. Sometimes it even seemed plausible for the entire ship (or station) to be lost if anything went wrong, or even the whole Federation. Even though disaster almost never struck, and the vast majority of Star Trek stories end in resolution and a return to (more or less—DS9 being the obvious exception in the latter half of its run) the status quo. Trek's writers used this to great effect over the years, because when the stakes got really high and the protagonists lost, it was that much more impactful.

So far, the crew of the Orville never loses. They somehow always come out ahead, almost as if by magic, and we the audience can see it coming light-years away. Aside from the lowbrow humor, that's the most detrimental flaw in The Orville's first season.

Fox renewed The Orville for a second season back in November, so it's reasonable to expect that we'll get to see some evolution of the concept whenever it returns (likely late next year, around the same time the first season started). If the show doesn't evolve in season two, I likely won't continue following it.