The third season of The Orville is on our list of most anticipated things for 2022, and today Hulu revealed a brand new poster for what is being called “New Horizons,” by Hulu, the new home for the series which ran for two seasons on Fox. The poster shows Hulu is sticking to the new June release date for Seth MacFarlane’s homage to Star Trek: The Next Generation. There is also a report on the future of the series.
New Horizons blasts off
Here is the new poster, with the tagline “New Home. New Missions.”
The poster features a number of ships forming the Planetary Union logo. In addition to the USS Orville itself, there is a Union fighter, Moclan cruiser, Krill fighter, Kaylon interceptor, and Kaylon cruiser. These could possibly hint at future storylines for “New Horizons.”
Future of the show is in question
The Orville has always been a passion project for Seth MacFarlane, but he also has other commitments as part of his 2020 deal with NBC Universal. This includes developing a new prequel TV series to his 2012 comedy Ted for Peacock. And according to Deadline, there are currently no firm plans to move forward on a fourth season of The Orville, and the cast was released from their options last August. The Orville’s Scott Grimes was just cast as a series regular on the Peacock Ted series. If New Horizons performs well for Hulu, the Disney-controlled streamer would likely want more from MacFarlane, if he and the cast can make it happen with their schedules.
New Horizons arrives June 2
The Orville: New Horizons premieres Thursday, June 2, 2022. The new season will consist of ten episodes which will be longer (60 minutes+) than when the show was on broadcast television. New episodes will be released weekly only on Hulu in the USA. Internationally The Orville is also on Star on Disney+ in select markets.
Here is the official synopsis:
Set 400 years in the future, “The Orville: New Horizons” finds the crew of the U.S.S. Orville continuing their mission of exploration, as they navigate both the mysteries of the universe and the complexities of their own interpersonal relationships.
The New Horizons ensemble cast includes Seth MacFarlane, Adrianne Palicki, Penny Johnson Jerald, Scott Grimes, Peter Macon, J. Lee, Mark Jackson, Chad L. Coleman, Jessica Szohr, and Anne Winters.
And in case you missed it, in December Hulu released their first official image from the show.
(Photo by: Michael Desmondl/Hulu)
And in February they released a sneak peek at the opening for the first episode of the season.
Keep up with all The Orville news and analysis on TrekMovie.
All the Deadline article did was stir the pot of rumors that the production staff put the lid on last year. The article reads like something that should have run on WeGotThisCovered, not Deadline.
I am always left to wonder why Paramount essentially shut down fan productions by imposing severe restrictions on them but allows something like this to go forward?
It’s murky territory, but usually ripoffs/parodies like this are legal. I don’t know what the percentage of difference has to be, changing enough elements to avoid lawsuits, etc. But the history of entertainment is full of people ripping off other people and often getting away with it. Even Trek itself did this from the start to a certain degree, what with Forbidden Planet and so on.
Chuck Jones was accused of ripping off Disney early in his career with the Sniffles cartoons. His reply to this was something like: “Well, if you’re going to ripoff someone, at least pick the best one.” :-)
Kind of a non issue at this point. I was under the impression CBS legal had signed off on it, and other reporting about the status of the show had no issues concluding that season three will be the last.
I remember an article, I think it was here on Trek Movie, that CBS Legal did review the show and signed off on it, but the only stipulation was they couldn’t have a transporter.
Well, the fan productions call themselves Star Trek right in the title. So there’s that.
And things were pretty much ignored by CBS/Paramount/Viacom until one of the productions (ahem, Axanar) started in on fairly suspect funding and getting a high profile.
Yeah Axanar tried to make a profit and that was a big no no.
Something like this? You mean something that’s vaguely reminiscent of or reminds one of TNG? This is highly subjective and there is absolutely no grounds for legal action here… People need to get over the fact that it has some of TNG’s DNA… but slugs share some DNA with humans but that doesn’t make them human does it?
I mean at least something feels like Trek these days.
<sigh> so true.
Allow it to go forward? How can they stop it? There’s nothing infringing about The Orville. Not one thing. Fan productions, however, ARE infringing since they use the Star Trek name, Star Trek ship names, Star Trek character names, etc.–and productions like Axanar make it worse by scamming people out of tons of money, which draws negative attention to the franchise. There are no laws saying something can’t be derivative. Heck, Star Trek IS derivative. Check out Forbidden Planet, from which Roddenberry lifted several elements. The Orville is its own show and is breaking no laws.
There are plenty of cases of outright theft in the arts that nobody does anything about. Listen to James Horner’s filmscores (and not just the early ones.) One reason so many of them sound so good is because better composers already wrote them, sometimes with virtually the same orchestration (listen to ALIENS and PATRIOT GAMES and tell me: are those new recordings or just needle drops from the centrifuge scene in 200!? (they’re THAT close.) How Horner was able to get away with this for his whole career is still utterly puzzling to me. And the fact he was able to repurpose his own work (original or ‘inspired by’) over and over, even though those projects were done for separate and competing studios, is equally infuriating. Listen to a 48HRS movie, then RED HEAT, COMMANDO and GORKY PARK. It’s the same damn tune (though GORKY does offer up a delicious orchestration.)
So to get tweaked over THE ORVILLE is to be annoyed about a certain lack of creativty and reliance on established tropes, but don’t confuse it with outright plagiarism. When another ‘writer’ takes your copy and reproduces huge sections word-for-word, only changing a bit of sentence order and ‘adding’ some misspellings, that’s deliberate plagiarism. As much as I hate to admit it, the Glen Larson TV shows leveraging off other people’s successful motion pictures probably skirted this, because they lift the flavor but not the ingredients.
Plagiarism is very common in music. Even the great classical composers stole from each other, trust me their our countless examples. Stravinsky once wrote: A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
Another blaring example is Brainstorm borrowing from TWOK…
Horner indeed went through periods where he self-referenced or had period sounds. I guess that’s what your comment about Aliens and Patriot Games is about, because he did both of those score.
How can they stop it? Easy. We already saw how with MGM and Austin Powers: A SLAPP suit that is too costly to bother to litigate over one relatively small property, with MGM eventually offering to settle for little or no money and also the requirement that future movies in the series require MGM’s approval, which MGM then categorically refused to grant.
CBS could have easily followed that blueprint to the same result if they so desired.
MGM had had a bit more to stand on there since they were largely contesting that the Austin Powers title leaned too hard on the existing Bond titles, less so about the content itself. There were plenty of blatant Bond knockoffs in the 60s to the 80s that were more Bond than The Orville is Trek.
There are several other sources MacFarlane could point to as having a similar premise to STAR TREK which Paramount has never gone after, which weakens their case considerably. Also, THE ORVILLE isn’t that close to TREK in its general makeup – for one thing, there’s no teleportation technology in THE ORVILLE’s universe, the ships are very deliberately designed not to resemble the “Starfleet look”, and while there are episodes that kind of resemble TREK episodes the similarity is general enough that proving Trademark Infringement or Plagiarism could just as easily go against Paramount…which could open the floodgates for fan productions again!
Because technically this has nothing to do with the Star Trek franchise (especially in its current form) and its branding
Not a huge fan of this show but it can’t be worse than Discovery or Picard right now.
not an Orville viewer, but based on the blurb above, seems like they are poised to out-Disco Disco
Pretty sure the “set 400 years in the future” is from present day, not an in universe time jump. The show was always set in the 25th century which puts it 400 years in the future from present. I could be wrong but I think that’s just a blurb for those who don’t know it’s a scifi show and may think it’s either about flight or popcorn.
“I think that’s just a blurb for those who don’t know it’s a scifi show and may think it’s either about flight or popcorn.”
There’s not a kernel of truth to that.
🤣😂🤣
Basically just picking the bar up off the ground here, eh?
Hey now, Discovery may have dragged a bit during the 2nd half of Season 4, but the finale more then made up for that. First time in 4 tries that they really nailed the landing.
Picard OTOH, this seasons reeks of being written by committee, which is a real shame considering how strong it started out. We’ve still got 3 episodes left, so fingers crossed.
A friend made a good point the other day, when you’re dealing with an episodic TV show, a single bad episode here or there (or even multiple in a row..) doesn’t ruin the whole season as you just move on to the next episode with a clean slate (more or less). That isn’t the case with a heavily serialized story, you can’t just move on from a bad episode because that episode is part of a bigger story. And if the story you’re telling over the course of 10 episodes isn’t a particularly good story, well you’ve just ruined an entire season of a show :P (I’m still convinced there’s a bunch of good plot lines going on with PIC season 2, they’re just not being explored for some unknown reason).
I will agree the season finale of Discovery was decent and the best one so far; but that’s not really saying a lot since all the others before that were pretty bad IMO.
But the season overall was still a meandering, tedious and melodramatic slog that could’ve told its story in half the time. They stretched things out to an unbelievable level that just didn’t have enough story to justify it. The story itself was actually thought provoking, engaging and even uplifting in the end. It was finally doing something people have been wanting to see this show do and that was discover strange new worlds and civilizations (and Species 10c did seem really nice). But its execution was just so bad, especially in the second half. By the time they got to that planet and the away team was getting emotionally affected by 1,000 year old space dust for 40 minutes, I had mentally checked out by then.
The idea was ambitious but as you said when it’s drawn out for an entire season and half of the episodes are so meandering and badly plotted it all becomes unwatchable in the end. They need better writers or a show runner. Maybe both, I don’t know.
I don’t even know what to say about season 2 of Picard. I’m just bitterly disappointed with that show right now.
Your determination to drag these shows in articles that don’t even revolve around them is super weird and frankly very disturbing. Why are you so obsessed with talking about shows you clearly cannot stand?!
You can just ignore my posts and comments then M1701. We’re on a board discussing Star Trek. If you can’t handle that,I really really don’t know what to tell you? Honestly I have no solution for you other than this one. So please just don’t read my posts and it should keep your blood pressure down. Agreed? Ok, take care of yourself.
Right now the best Star Trek on television.
Agree 💯%! 😁👍
Also agree 100%.
Absolutely agree!
The Orville is not Star Trek and to keep saying it’s Star Trek is not allowing it to be its own thing. It could have been like stargate and become great on its own merit Rather than the Star Trek inspired show but Instead it’s going to be forever be in star treks shadow as that show the old fans like because they don’t like the new one and can’t accept that the old style of story telling isn’t being used and therefore since the Orville does it must be lifted up and shoved in every fans face as ‘real trek’.
Its not like they can use the whole well it’s free to watch anymore.
Agree…so sad to say, but I agree.
I mean… it’s Deadline. They used to be a credible source, but these days they’re basically an unreliable tabloid that makes things up. They’re no better than poorly written clickbait fake-source sites like We Got This Covered, Giant Freakin Robot, AICN, Bleeding Cool, Screen Rant, etc. Take anything they report with a grain of salt.
Is it that they don’t pay well? I made a couple inquiries there back during the pandemic, attaching solid writing samples, and don’t think I even got an acknowledgement from them. Even really sharp and busy places like Vulture will acknowledge a well-written query letter (I’ve never sold to them, but I’m not ruling them out because the responses are so professional and detailed), but a lot of the outlets that aren’t top-tier (along with some that remain surprisingly well-trafficked) don’t seem interested in attracting talent or simply don’t pay anything remotely like an appropriate wage.
I get that some places operate with fixed budgets that don’t allow for specials. Shoot, I write for one print outlet (well, they’re still temporarily suspending the print aspect, but that will probably lift soon) that I first began writing for in 2000, and for the same price-per-word now as then, but I cherish the gig, because it is steady and often fun — plus that rate is close to the high end of what I get for other articles. l’ve had to turn down two other places that offered to have me doing 12-15 stories 2000-3000 word stories per year because their rates were fixed at a level that, with transcription, interviewing and writing time, would net me a rate considerably lower than my day job, which I have mainly so the family has medical coverage.
I think that the issue of getting coverage, especially from web only outlets, is already affecting certain companies, as I have gotten queries about doing stories for low-paying outlets where my income would be augmented by the company I’m doing the interview about, which for me has always been a no-fly zone. The fact it is coming up more and more makes me think the issue of not paying the writer who doesn’t have a guild behind him a decent wage is here to stay.
I do have one outlet that pays way way low, but I try to offset that by only taking stories for them on projects I’m already covering … that way, unused material from interviews can find a home and generate a bit of extra revenue. I don’t ever reuse the same material in different articles, and have never understood how that was permitted in the past, when you might read the same quotes in American Cinematographer and ICG and then notice both pieces were written by the same guy (some interviewees do say the same thing in different interviews — I’m working on TOP GUN right now, and some of the most exciting stuff I heard has since turned up in other already-published stories — but that’s not the writer’s fault.)
There’s also a level of, for want of a better word, snottiness emerging as of late. I queried a major print/web outlet about doing a story on THE OA filmmakers (who now have a new series for FX in the works) back when the second season was airing. Most of the pitch was establishing my bona fides, because I didn’t know the editor. I got an amazing response — I wish I’d printed it out, just to have it framed above my desk — where the editor derided me at length for not giving sufficient information about the worthiness of the interviewees (he had never heard of them or the series or apparently seen Brit Marling’s other feature work, an admission I found stunning.) This was an industry (read: Guild) journal, mind you, not a pop magazine.
The same month, I got something from a pretty good filmmaking website that wanted to know why I really wanted to write about a particular group of artisans … as if the project and the material as described in my query couldn’t be the reason! The guy pretty much demanded to know how much I was going to make from the interviewee, and seemed skeptical rather than apologetic when he got my rather heated response about not pimping myself out.
So if those are the kinds of opportunists who are flourishing right now, then you can probably expect endless boatloads of click-bait articles that are more about spin than content.
Cool! I still hope Disney would release season three of The Orville on DVD and Digital in time for Christmas.
i’ve wanted to get into this show and tried several times….i usually tap out after the first 2 or 3 episodes of season 1….does it get better and is it worth watching?
Infinitely better and definitely worth watching. Best new Trek on TV. Season 1 is good. Season 2 is Excellent.
Season 1 is a rather experimental season. They spent time trying to find the tone of the show, a sweet spot for the comedy and drama. Give it a chance and watch the full Season. It’s a great show with lots of Trek Veterans working behind the scenes on the writing staff as well as in the effects / makeup departments.