Trek Thursday: The Orville

Confession: I've never been a fan of Seth MacFarlane. I mean this both in the "I literally haven't watched any of his shows" sense and in the "I'm understating my active dislike of this putz" sense. I hate the art style of Family Guy and American Dad so much that I don't know if the humor is for me (except I will say the long-running gag about how Meg is fat/ugly/whatever is unfunny to the point of being cringe-inducing); his bit hosting the Oscars years ago with "I saw your boobs!" was ill-advised and, again, unfunny to the point of being cringe-inducing; when he's actually appeared on other shows I've watched (he had I think at least two interviews on The Daily Show?), he just seemed pretty bland.

So why do I love The Orville so damn much? Did MacFarlane suddenly surround himself with actually funny people? Did his prefrontal cortex finally finish developing? (Welcome to adulthood, my dude, I'm glad you finally joined the rest of us.) Does he just do sci-fi better than straight-up comedy? ("It's not a parody of 80s Trek," one of my friends commented. "It IS 80s Trek.") Is it just that Star Trek: Discovery is SO UNBELIEVABLY NOT TREK-LIKE that I'll take what I can get?

I don't know, but I'm glad it's out there to scratch my Star Trek itch after Discovery dropped the ball. (If I can mix metaphors a bit.) Let's just forget Discovery ever happened and let it flop along with CBS's weird streaming thing they're trying to tie to it, and then fold The Orville into the Star Trek canon. Discovery and the J. J. Abrams retoolings can have their own little awful bubble of "AU bullshit for people with no attention spans."