The Orville: Majority Rules Review

This show pretty much falls under “What were they thinking!?” and rather than engage with  it years later on a podcast like “How Did This Get Made” or Nathan Rabin’s “Year of Flops” it’s hard to deny how interesting it is to watch a train wreck as It’s happening. The show’s main crime (other than critics having it out for Seth MacFarlane) is not putting enough jokes in what is supposed to be a comedy. There are also echoes of mirroring Star Trek way too closely but I’ll call BS on that-Galaxy Quest, the occasional Saturday Night Live skit, Thank God You’re Here and 10 Items or Less (off the top of my head) all had pretty exact Star Trek parodies,  and no one cared whether it mirrored the source material too closely.

But yes: The show is mostly boring and oddly focused on a bickering domestic couple at the center without being unaware that they are getting tired. At the same time, it’s kind of nice to re-imagine a version of Starfleet where people will get drunk and pull pranks on each other. The distant cordiality between the seven principals on TNG, and the exponentially greater emotional distance between the senior staff and everyone else on the ship, made for an extremely stuffy adventure.   And hey, Penny Johnson, who was great on Deep Space Nine is here and she’s not awful here.

I’ve skipped over a couple of the episodes but I caught this week (mostly because it was on) and I’d call it the best possible scenario this show could hope for. In other words, it was mildly good. While I think criticism that the show is too close a clone to Star Trek are missing the point of parody, it doesn’t exactly help that this week’s plot has an awful lot in common with the Black Mirror episode starring Dallas Bryce Howard in which society becomes dangerously over reliant on the kind of peer approval enforced through social media channels today. Then again, it was my favorite Black Mirror episode so I was willing to see someone else’s take on it.

In this episode, a crewman named John (I have no idea his rank or position other than sitting on the bridge and pressing buttons, sorry) and some of his fellow crewmates (who all coincidentally happen to be senior staff members) travel down to some version of 21^st Century Earth (equally absurd now as it was in the original series) and Jon gets in trouble for grinding on a statue. It’s worth mentioning, if for no other reason than Seth MacFarlane gets a frat-boy reputation, that it would be an overgeneralization to call the grand statue humping emblematic of the show’s lowbrow ethos : It just happens to be a major plot point this week, and it’s kind of funny when you consider that I could never in a million years picture anyone from The Next Generation humping a statue (though it might be a fun twitter poll: Which TNG member came the closest to statue-humping behavior?).

Anyhow, John has to go on one of those public apology tours or he risks a full-frontal lobotomy if he can’t convince the public of the sincerity of his apology on an apology tour. Once again, many of the laughs are genuine because John is so detached from any expectations of sensible behavior or even common sense when going about such a delicate situation. It’s the basis of good parody and when well-done, it’s funny. The show is such a trainwreck that it’s only decently funny, but it was worth my hour.