The Orville

Overall, "Electric Sheep" is definitely a great episode, but it would maybe be better if the show didn't continue in the same vein for the rest of the season. Serious stories like this, while important, don't exactly fit in with The Orville's brand of humor and wonder. As a rare treat, it's certainly satisfying, but here's hoping we get to see more classic sci-fi adventure stories in the next episodes.

It’s got top-notch special effects and terrific makeup (for its space-alien characters). But it just doesn’t quite gel. At least not yet, anyway.

The Orville needs considerable work to accomplish whatever it wants to be--assuming that MacFarlane and company even have that answer. For now it’s boldly but very unsteadily going forth, with its jokes working here and there while the action and “messages” bump along at best.

The Orville seems to be less about comedy or science-fiction than about Ed Mercer’s middle-age angst, expressed primarily through his peevish anger toward his ex-wife.

The lack of creativity is clear, given how it takes the basic framework of a “Trek” series and files off the serial numbers. But morally, it’s hard to imagine how anyone involved with this project could be comfortable with walking onto that set, watching those episodes, and seeing how blatant the imitation is.

There are too few jokes for it to truly feel like a comedy (despite appearing that way in early promos), but attempts at humor muddy the series' ambitions as a pure sci-fi adventure. By flirting with two genres, MacFarlane has created a messy series that lacks focus.

An air of self-congratulation hangs over the entire hour, as if MacFarlane, who wrote it, couldn’t get over his awe at his own bravery in engaging with a difficult, complex topic.

Absolutely top notch Star Trek like show brought to you by yours truly Seth McFarlane

Watch the first season only. I'm a fan of both Family guy, at least the older seasons and Star Trek, prior to Discovery so this show would be the perfect mix for me. Well, kinda. I really liked the first season, I don't mind and actually embrace humor and SciFi so long as the humor is well done and enhances the story rather than distract from it and this show manages it well. The first season for me had the perfect amount of both and the storyline was interesting. Season 2 was okay, less memorable than 1 but I liked the relationship between Claire and Isaac. The storylines were okay, nothing impressive or bad. Season 3 unfortunately veers off into bad territory. First way too much time is spent on Claire's children. They're okay as side characters but they wanted to make them main characters. They suffer from the Wesley from Star Trek problem in that, no one cares about the children of the main protagonists. DS9 actually did it really well where they didn't overuse them and used them for specific storylines rather than making them main cast. Also the turnaround with the evil robots at the end of the season was fun. Unfortunately S3 goes deep into wokeness. Over half the season is spent on the trans child of one of the main cast. Overall through all 3 seasons, probably 10-15 episodes are centered on this topic. It's not interesting and goes for way too long. They really couldn't think of anything more interesting to do than what literally everyone else in Hollywood is doing? I don't mind them wrapping up the story but the overwhelming majority of the season is this topic and leaves too little time for other more interesting and thought provoking things which Star Trek which this show tries to copy did so well. Also they introduce a new hot officer and tease that she was sad for her friend dying and they make her a lesbian at the end of the season, I think literally the last episode. Shoddy, surface level Hollywood sensibilities. Why did we have to know she was a lesbian, why is a character's sexuality even important if it doesn't add anything to do story, why also such a divisive topic? Before the woke mind virus took control of Hollywood, a characters sexuality, whatever it was, was almost never disclosed, for the purpose of not being relevant to the plot. However as we've regressed, this is now the personality, sometimes the whole personality, of some characters. So season 3 to summarize is, almost the whole season spent on a trans child, a lesbian new officer who dies and Claire's children which are not badly written but irrelevant and not that interesting. There is some good with the robots storyline and Claire and Isaac's relationship which were well-written but out of the whole season I got maybe 1 hour, maybe 2 hours of fun and was bored for the rest. This retroactively now makes the whole series not worth the watch.

First two seasons were great. In light of Discovery and Picard, they were the best Trek around. Season 3? Not so much. They veered full-on into Discovery territory, dragging my score down. Especially this most recent episode. Talked about one-sided.

More like Star Trek Discovery than Star Trek the Next Generation. Seth McFarlan isn't very good at writing science fictions. The writing is soft and comes across as very American at times (count the times you hear "cool" or "ok" in the show). He just doesn't get what made the old Star Trek shows great. Season 3 in particular falls into the trap of embedding social political commentary into almost every episode. It's all meta commentary on issues such as mental health, Trans rights, inter racial relationships, etc. I'll be blunt in 2025 I'm board of seeing this in my escapism hobbies.

Not my kind of humor. Star Trek may be dead thanks to Mr. Kurtzman, but that didn't make me get aboard the Orville. The strange mix of cringe humor and attempts at serious storytelling just didn't work out for me.