Now The Orville actor J. Lee is giving fans hope for a fourth season

The Orville is a Star Trek-esque science fiction show that began life on Fox before jumping to Hulu. The show has always been good, sometimes great, and has a passionate fanbase. But it comes out so intermittently. The show has been on the air since 2017 and has only produced three seasons so far. And a fourth is not guaranteed.

Fans have been trying to read the tea leaves about a fourth season ever since season 3 wrapped up in 2022. Different cast members say different things. “We think it’s gonna happen, but it’s still up in the air,” Chad L. Coleman (Klyden) said in March. That’s good! But then, just a couple of weeks ago, Adrianne Palicki (Kelly) said she “truly doesn’t know” whether the show is returning, but hinted that if it did, she wouldn’t be a part of it. “No, no longer doing that. I did three seasons,” she said. She also called the experience of making the show “horrible.” That’s bad.

But THEN, literally the day after Palicki’s interview went live, cast member J. Lee (John LaMarr) tweeted out a message that seemed to imply The Orville season 4 was still on, or at least that he was holding out hope:

“#LaMarrLifts #TheOrville #Loading.” And the dude on the right is saying “Job’s not finished.” It certainly sounds like Lee has more he wants to do on the show. When someone asked whether this meant that The Orville was returning, he posted another little video of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The rabbit is holding a sign with a number on it: the number four. ThE ORvILle seASoN 4 kOnfiRmED?

Obviously this doesn’t mean anything definitive, but fans will take what they can get at this point. And it’s interesting that this hopeful message comes from Lee, whom Palicki said was living on  “saltines and Gatorade” at one point as they waited to go back to work during one of the show’s long inter-season dry spells. One of the reasons Palicki was frustrated with the experience was because it was hard for the actors to sustain themselves financially while waiting to hear if they still had a job with The Orville.

But it seems that Lee may feel differently about that than Palicki does. Right now, all we can do is add Lee’s message to the pile of hints about a fourth season. Hopefully we get something more substantive soon.

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h/t Bam Smack Pow