Seth MacFarlane has “no idea” if The Orville will return

Last week marked the season 3 finale of The Orville, and what a run it has been. After two seasons on FX, the show made the jump to Hulu for its third season, where it flourished. Subtitled The Orville: New Horizons, season 3 of the comedic science fiction drama was not only better than its previous seasons by leagues, but also one of the most polished shows on TV.

But as of this writing, the fate of The Orville is still up in the air. Creator, executive producer, and star Seth MacFarlane (Captain Ed Mercer) spoke at length with Syfy Wire and gave a bit more insight into the state of the show and his approach to crafting its third season finale, which was intentionally designed to be satisfying for fans in case The Orville wasn’t renewed for season 4. The title — “Future Unknown” — is a nod to this. “You do want to continue to expand the world and, in a perfect scenario, tease what’s to come. But we just don’t know what’s to come. We just haven’t gotten a firm answer,” MacFarlane said.

"The response that you see online is so gratifying and from an isolated standpoint, would seem to be promising, but you just never know whether that translates into something that’s actually viable in a business sense. I just really have no idea. You take shows that are critically acclaimed over the years, put them up against audience numbers, and those don’t always align. So I really have no idea what’s happening…I have made no secret of the fact that I would love to do a Season 4. But I think it’s going to be a minute before I find out whether that’s in the cards."

As for what he’d like to explore in season 4, MacFarlane says the writers like to take an organic approach. “There are plot-lines, and new developments this season that certainly suggest themselves as possible candidates for expansion in a Season 4. We can certainly guess what those would be, they’re pretty obvious. When we sat down to write Season 3, we didn’t plan to upend all these alliances and that the Kaylon would now be our allies and the Maclons would now be our enemies.”

"That just kind of came about through a willingness to not be afraid of f***ing with our own universe and not being too precious about maintaining any kind of cemented consistency in the way that you sometimes feel like you have to do with episodic television (that everything has to return to normal). I think anything should be free to be upended at any time, as long as the characters and the show that you love still feel like that show. It’s interesting, we’ve completely flipped everything, but it’s still The Orville. It doesn’t change the soul of what that show is."

The Orville: New Horizons finale was a “victory lap” for the show

While The Orville: New Horizons got progressively bigger and more spectacular as it went, MacFarlane and the rest of the team did something unexpected for the season finale. Instead of making the episode bigger and more explosive than ever, The Orville toned things down after its breathtaking penultimate episode, “Domino.” Instead, the season finale focused on the wedding of Dr. Claire Finn (Penny Johnson Jerald) and Isaac (Mark Jackson). It also brought back a character named Lysella from the first season and added her to the crew, which is something the show can follow up on should it return.

“On the one hand, there was just no way — at least this year — that we could top what we did in ‘Domino.’ On the other hand, it just seems wonderfully unconventional to do it that way,” MacFarlane explained. “The strength of this show, despite how much the scope has increased, is still the characters. I think that’s why you watch any show. The television landscape is filled right now with offerings that have these massive special effects budgets that can show you just about anything you’d want to see. What used to only be the visual effects territory of movies is now something that you can see on countless TV shows. So you do still have to set yourself apart by avoiding the temptation to let that be your show.”

"It really does have to be about the people. That’s one of the things that we’ve always made a real effort to keep in focus: that this is a show about the characters. That’s the nucleus of it. Despite the spectacle, despite the size, it’s really about the people. Again, it felt like a way to exhale after the season and just kind of do a little victory lap — at least for ourselves — because we had worked hard and we felt like we had done good work. But also to make sure that as big and as epic as the season had gotten, was to make sure that we could still tell those stories that didn’t need any of that. [Stories] that needed nothing but these personalities interacting with each other. And hopefully, that’s what we did."

Lysella is meant to be a viewer stand-in

One of the more interesting developments in the finale is Lysella (Giorgia Whigham) joining the crew of the USS Orville. Lysella hails from a planet where the society is a little more like ours…if we made all our important decisions by upvoting and downvoting people, which may not be that far off. Her return meant that the show could explore a perspective it had never had before: ours.

“Lysella is us, essentially,” MacFarlane explained. “That’s kind of how we looked at her in the world of the series. Lysella is our eyes into this world and in many ways, she represents the wish fulfillment of sci-fi fans wanting to just jump ahead to that magnificent, utopian future that we all long for. I think she’ll continue to be that voice. Of course, Giorgia Whigham is a fantastic actress who just played that beautifully, and it certainly didn’t hurt that that was an episode that people continue to harken back to whenever I read about the show. ‘The Majority Rule’ was an episode that [fans] really just responded to for a number of [reasons]. But I think it’s a color that we haven’t really had on on the ship thus far. Certainly people like Gordon [Scott Grimes] have an affinity for the 20th and 21st centuries; he sort of has an attachment to that time period, as he mentioned in Episode 6, but Lysella is different. That’s a special situation in which this is a direct fish-out-of-water scenario. In many ways, it forced us to explain our own universe and obviously, our universe has similarities to other sci-fi franchises.”

"But what started off as a simple, ‘Let’s have her be our eyes into this amusement park and she can kind of take us through it in the finale,’ turned into a real challenge. And we’ve had to, through Kelly [Adrianne Palicki], really break down and justify the mechanics of our own universe and its political systems and to explain this thing that seems like a meritocracy, but is really something a little different. I think we’re still doing that, I think we’re still figuring [that out]. We’re not politicians, we’re not policymakers — we’re television writers. So we really are guessing in a lot of ways. They’re educated guesses to some degree, but they’re still guesses. And to be able to continue to do that through that character is an interesting challenge from a writing standpoint. I’d love to get into that."

Whatever the future holds for The Orville, New Horizons has set a tremendously high bar as one of the strongest seasons of science fiction TV in 2022.

All three seasons of The Orville are available now on Hulu. They’ll also be available on Disney+ starting on August 10, so it’s a perfect time to check this show out if you haven’t gotten on board the USS Orville yet.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels