Seth MacFarlane on The Orville season 4: “The show is not dead”

It’s been well over a year since the third season of Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville concluded, but fans have been left in limbo regarding the fate of the series. Will The Orville return or has it been canceled? We still don’t know, but according to MacFarlane, the series isn’t dead yet.

“I’m trying to remember what the exact, well-worded politic statement was that Hulu put out…,” MacFarlane told TVLine. “All I can say is the same thing that Hulu said, which is the show is not dead. Nobody has told me that it’s dead from the network, so we’re proceeding under those auspices.“

For the record, Craig Erwich, President of ABC Entertainment and Hulu & Disney Branded Television Streaming Originals, said this about the possibility of The Orville season 4 last January: “We don’t have anything to share right now. It’s a great show and I know that the fans loved having it back in their lives. And Seth [MacFarlane] did a great job, uniquely as he can, in front of and behind the camera. But we don’t have anything to share right now.“

Scott Grimes, who co-stars in The Orville alongside MacFarlane, feels optimistic that the show will return. “Right before the strike, it feels like we were going to announce a Season 4,” Grimes said. “I think it’s a better than good possibility that we get to do this again… This is [Seth’s] little child, he loves to do The Orville, and it’d be a shame if we didn’t get to do one more season. So I would say that I’m optimistic. That’s what I would say.” As a fan of The Orville, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the series hasn’t been canceled.

While it was initially assumed that The Orville would be a straight-up comedy, the show quickly found its own identity as a quality sci-fi series, particularly if you’re a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Seth MacFarlane has admitted that the initial marketing for the series didn’t do them any favours. “Season 1 [advertising] was definitely more of a misfire,” MacFarlane said. “It just wasn’t indicative of what the show was. You were seeing basically every gag in the pilot rattled off, one after another, when in reality they were fairly sparse and the focus was more on the story. I think that didn’t do us any favors, at least as far as the show was received by critics. I think a lot of them felt misled and that made them real cranky.” You can check out a review of the latest season from our own Alex Maidy right here.