Star Trek: Discovery not going boldly enough for you? Then set a course for The Orville

Star Trek diehards have spent much of the past decade screaming into the void. The franchise’s ideological nemesis, Star Wars, has trampled all before it, Imperial Stormtrooper-style. JJ Abrams’s rebooted Trek films have meanwhile added to the insult, with their buccaneering dumbing down of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision of a shiny, optimistic future. It’s enough to make you pull off your pointy Vulcan ears in frustration – or yell "Abramssss!" until your face turns purple. 

But, finally, respite is at hand. A new science fiction series has just beamed down which evokes the utopianism and intellectual ambition of the original Sixties Star Trek and its no-less iconic early Nineties follow-up, The Next Generation. Strange new worlds are explored. Knotty moral questions come under the microscope. Humanity is celebrated for rising above its present day squabbles and charting a bright, hopeful course for the stars. 

This new series is not Star Trek: Discovery. The overblown latest official addition to the canon– freshly arrived on Netflix –  is the embodiment of everything fans have come to loathe about "JJ Trek". It’s noisy, self-consciously bleak and hobbled by video game-level special effects. Some critics have praised Discovery’s dystopian grit – but those with a deeper appreciation of  sci-fi may see it as a fundamental portrayal of Trek’s core values. 

So it is perhaps no surprise that many in the Trek "community" have set course for The Orville, an unlikely sci-fi triumph from Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, which debuted in the US last month and is due to shortly air on Fox UK (a precise date yet to be announced). It is everything Discovery is not: cheerful, pleasant to behold and with an emphasis on cerebral storytelling. 

Paying homage to Captain Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard was the explicit goal of MacFarlane, who cast himself as the Kirk-esque lead character of Captain Ed Mercer. The bridge of the USS Orville – a "Planetary Union" deep space exploration vessel –  is a dead ringer for the comfy command centre over which Patrick Stewart’s Picard sternly presided.

Aliens are distinguished, in proper Star Trek style, by the configurations of their bumpy foreheads. MacFarlane – a self-confessed science and space opera nerd – even hired the The Next Generation’s original director of photography, Marvin Rush.

"The inspiration I took most from that show was – it was more of a production design thing – if you are in space for a long period of time, you cannot really be in a dark, dimly lit submarine or you are going to go crazy," he told the website Trekmovie.com. "If you are out in a tin can for long stretches it has got to feel like a Four Seasons. There has to be houseplants and sofas and carpeting. It has to be a place that is really comfortable, or the psychology of it just doesn’t work. You would go batsh**t if you are out there for too long."

MacFarlane is a surprising champion of erudite sci-fi, having unleashed upon humanity lowest dominator guffaw-fests Family Guy, American Dad and Ted. Moreover, The Orville is so blatantly derivative it is hard to believe lawyers at CBS, custodian of the Star Trek brand, haven’t set phasers to "sue". (Fox executives describe the series as a "homage" and are confident they will not be taken to court.)

The show is also nominally a comedy and it was in that context that the first two episodes were mauled by US critics last month, with the Washington Post proclaiming it a "deep space dud" and Variety despairing of the "frat-bro" humour .

The gags are indeed terrible, invariably revolving around rude words and disgusting alien food. The big running "joke", meanwhile, is that Captain Mercer has been lumbered with ex wife Kelly Grayson (Friday Night Lights’s Adrianne Palicki) as first officer as The Orville sets out on a mission of deep space exploration. Cue squabbling on the bridge and constant references to Kelly wrecking their marriage by sleeping with blue extra terrestrial. 

Yet week by week The Orville has shed its comedic skin – an indication, it is tempting to conclude, that the chuckles were merely a cloaking device whereby MacFarlane could convince Fox to green-light a gushing valentine to Star Trek.

In the latest episode the crew of the Orville – among them a Worf-esque alien and Data-style android – stumbled upon a moon- sized space ship drifting towards a star. Within lived a civilisation that believed itself descended from an ancient deity (portrayed, in a satisfying reveal, by Liam Neeson). It's classic Trek – a zippy caper doubling as rumination on faith, identity and importance of challenging age-old orthodoxies. 

Star Trek before Discovery: what did the cast do next?

With critics gleefully chucking rotten fruit in MacFarlane’s direction, it's unclear whether The Orville will be given the time to find an audience beyond disaffected Trek-heads. What a shame if it were to be sent to the scrap yard before achieving warp velocity.

In this era of didactic dystopias – see Star Trek: Discovery and also the moochy new Blade Runner 2049–  we could do with some of Trek’s old-school optimism. As comedy The Orville is a disaster. As a Star Trek reboot it's even better than the real thing.