The Orville’s third season finale, which sure felt like it could be a series finale, warned you right in its title: “Future Unknown.” But though there’ve been no new Orville episodes since 2022, the Hulu show’s passionate fan base has been keeping the faith on social media. And now, creator and star Seth MacFarlane has offered some fresh hope for a possible fourth season.
“All I can tell you is that the the there is no official death certificate for The Orville,” MacFarlane said in a new interview with the Wrap. “It is still with us. I can’t go any further than that at the moment. There are too many factors.” The trade also spoke with Orville co-star Scott Grimes, who said “I do know that we are still talking about it … I know Seth wants to do it and that usually holds a lot of power. And I hope he gets to because it’s one of his babies that he just loves and it’s a blast to work on.”
Fans already know The Orville has proven resilient in the past; the first two seasons of the sci-fi series—which at first looked like it might be a mere Star Trek homage, before swiftly proving it had plenty of its own merits—aired on Fox before a season-three shift to Hulu, with brought with it a slight title change, The Orville: New Horizons. In the wake of the third-season finale, the entire run of the show also became available on Disney+.
Back in May 2022, io9 spoke with MacFarlane about whether the show might continue after its then-current third season. He couldn’t give us a “yes” or “no” answer, of course, but he made it clear he’d love to spend more time telling stories in his sci-fi world. “It’s really like Family Guy in a lot of ways,” he told us. “It’s a universe that has infinite boundaries and so it can really go as long as there’s a demand for it. It’s a true ensemble show—there are, what, nine, 10 characters that are that are all, I think, equally dynamic. So there are lots and lots more stories. That’s really governed by audience response, if there’s an appetite for it, and the commitment by a studio to give us the resources—Disney and Hulu were wonderful this year. [With] the palette they gave us to work with and the resources they gave us, I’ve never in my career really had this experience to this degree. I mean, if the show gets really big—that’s why I hope we didn’t screw it up.”
You can catch up on The Orville’s excellent first three seasons (and see why it deserves a fourth) on either Hulu or Disney+.
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