The Orville Season 4 is written. It still does not have a year.

Where it stands, as of Oct. 1, 2026: The Orville is the science-fiction series Seth MacFarlane created and stars in. He told The Hollywood Reporter in March that all 10 scripts for its fourth season are written. The magazine reported that Hulu, the Disney-controlled streaming service that carried Season 3, was ready to go ahead, and MacFarlane said he was the holdup. There is still no production start and no date. On Sept. 30, the streaming service Peacock announced a different sci-fi show in development, Future Housewives, written by Brannon Braga, an executive producer on The Orville, with MacFarlane producing, which could take up the same two men’s time. Nobody has cancelled The Orville.

I was skeptical of the first episode. A Seth MacFarlane space comedy, launching on Fox in the fall of 2017, two weeks before Star Trek: Discovery, looked like a parody that had wandered onto the schedule by accident. The uniforms looked borrowed from Star Trek, and Capt. Ed Mercer, played by MacFarlane himself, seemed to exist only to set up the next broad joke.

The comedy is what kept me there, and it changed shape episode by episode. The early stuff is workplace humor on a starship: a divorced captain whose ex-wife is the first officer, a helmsman who should not be trusted with a shuttle, an alien couple arguing about culture the way other couples argue about the thermostat. I wanted more serious stories, but the show was still better than I expected. By the middle of Season 1, an episode would often start on a gag and, by the last scene, be about something that mattered.

Fox ran two seasons, from 2017 to 2019, and renewed the show in May 2019. By then Disney had bought the Fox studio that makes The Orville, and that July the show was moved to Disney’s streaming service, Hulu. Filming started in late 2019 and, slowed by the pandemic, ran into 2021, so the new season did not arrive until June 2022.

The three years between Season 2 and Season 3 felt endless, and for a while I was not sure Season 3 would ever come.

When it landed on Hulu as The Orville: New Horizons, the episodes ran longer and the stories got heavier. The mess-hall jokes stayed, but when a story turned hard, the show let it play out to the end. Four years on, it is still the most recent Orville anyone has seen.

How it stacks up against Star Trek

The comparison is fair, and the show invited it. Brannon Braga, who made his name writing for The Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise, three Star Trek series, is an executive producer. The ship, the bridge, the landing party sent down to each new planet, the weekly moral problem: that whole setup comes straight from Star Trek of the 1980s and ’90s. MacFarlane said in 2017 that he missed “the forward-thinking, aspirational, optimistic place in science fiction that Star Trek chose to occupy.” He felt the genre had gone dark, and he had a point.

The Orville’s officers get things wrong far more often than a Star Trek crew does, and the fun is watching them come through anyway. Mercer got the ship only because the fleet was short of captains and his ex-wife quietly recommended him, and now he has to command the woman who left him. That situation makes the ship feel like a place where people have lives outside their jobs.

On the hard stories, I think The Orville is often the braver show. Episodes about gender and culture go places The Next Generation touched in the 1990s and then left alone. Season 3 in particular plays its serious stories straight, without a joke to soften them. The show’s title ship belongs to the Planetary Union, a peaceful alliance of worlds. In Season 2, the Kaylon, a race of machines, attacked the Union, and Season 3 returns to that war and asks what a weapon that could end it would cost. It also follows Bortus, an officer from the Moclans, a nearly all-male species, through the long fight over his child, Topa. Topa was born female and changed to male as a baby on a Moclan court’s order, and in Season 3 wants to live as a girl.

The Star Trek shows that aired in the same years as The Orville were built very differently. Discovery told one long, grim story per season. Picard, a later series about Jean-Luc Picard, the captain from The Next Generation, spent its first season on an old man’s regrets. Strange New Worlds is the closer cousin, a ship show with a sense of humor and a new story most weeks, but it still has to bring back characters from older shows and stay true to decades of settled Star Trek history, which fans call the canon. Paramount, which owns Star Trek, keeps several series going at once, and they all have to fit together. The Orville has none of that to serve. Jon Cassar, who directed 11 of its 36 episodes, told Gizmodo in 2022: “We’re just The Orville. We get to sort of make up the rules ourselves and follow our own rules.”

Syfy’s The Ark, airing now

The Ark, from Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner, is another recent show set aboard a spaceship. It runs on the cable channel Syfy, and it is on the air now. Its own third season is in its closing stretch: Episode 10 aired Sept. 30, and the season finale is set for Oct. 14.

The Ark started as survival television. A colony ship is wrecked while still more than a year’s travel from the planet it was headed for, and most of its senior officers are dead. The survivors have to keep the air on. Most episodes turn on the next thing that breaks and the people who have to fix it, so there is little room for jokes. This season the crew has a colony and a rescue mission, but the show is still about staying alive. On The Orville, the Planetary Union is at peace and the ship is in good shape, so the trouble usually comes from meeting people who live by other rules.

The three shows side by side

What Season 4 still needs

Back in March, MacFarlane summed it up himself: “The 10 scripts are done. I’m the problem.” The first thing Season 4 needs is a year in which MacFarlane is not busy with his cartoon series Family Guy and American Dad! After that comes money and paperwork. The cast’s contracts had already run out by 2022, The Hollywood Reporter said. Even with Hulu willing, new deals have to come out of the money Disney spends on new shows, which it has been cutting since 2023, Deadline has reported.

Future Housewives, the Peacock show, is a satire about socialites on an asteroid, with the reality-TV star Ariana Madix in the lead. If it goes ahead, it will compete with The Orville for MacFarlane’s and Braga’s time.

Those of us who came in doubtful and stayed just want those 10 scripts filmed while the cast can still be brought back together.