The Orville: Series Creator Seth MacFarlane Discusses Season 4 Whereabouts

• “The Orville” fears for a 4th season.
• After moving to Disney, the future of the sci-fi series is uncertain.
• According to series creator Seth MacFarlanes, this is due to the change in the streaming industry.

“The Orville” is Seth MacFarlane’s humorous answer to “Star Trek”. In the three seasons so far, the series creator has played with science fiction clichés, broken with conventions and inspired a large audience. His series is popular, even with Trekkies, and yet no fourth season has been announced. Now MacFarlane is speaking out on Twitter himself, responding to a fan about the whereabouts of The Orville.

The industry is in the midst of a period of upheaval and change. I wish I could give a definitive answer to your question. At the moment I can only say that I remain cautiously optimistic.

Seth MacFarlane via Twitter

“The Orville” migrated to the US streaming service Hulu in the summer of 2022 with the third season. The series continued to run successfully there and yet the service, which belongs to Disney, has not yet given the green light for further episodes.

This makes “The Orville” just one of many “victims” of the current change that MacFarlane mentions in his commentary. The streaming industry has experienced a tremendous boom since the 2010s and has been growing at an incredible pace up until today. Now that boom has come to an end and growth is slowing.

This is forcing companies like Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney to restructure the strategy they’ve been pursuing for the past few years. As companies continue to pour millions into their productions, they now need to pay more attention to what content drives significant subscriber growth.

A good example of this is the US streaming service HBO Max, which produces the series “The Last of Us”, “House of the Dragon” and “Doom Patrol”. After the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery, the newly formed company Warner Bros. Discovery decided to discontinue HBO Max.

Only really lucrative series will be included in their new streaming service. As a result, countless series and productions were scrapped. Including the already finished “Batgirl” film.

Netflix has also made more and more negative headlines in recent months. The streaming service discontinued numerous series such as “Warrior Nun”, “1899” and “Fate – The Winx Saga” after just a few seasons.

The same thing will happen to Disney now. The company announced major changes. In the future, Disney will reduce the costs of personnel, advertising and its entertainment programs. This should increase efficiency.

The fantasy series “Willow” was one of the first to feel the changes. After just one season, the series, which only started in winter 2022, was canceled again. “The Orville” could possibly be similar. So far, Disney hasn’t announced whether the sci-fi series will fit the company’s new structure.

No big cliffhangers after season 3

In wise foresight, MacFarlane has probably already prepared for the end of the series and brought Season 3 a relatively smooth finale. So in the finale we see the renewal of the marriage of Bortus (Peter Macon) and Klyden (Chad L. Coleman) and the marriage of Claire and Isaac. So the last episode focused a lot on the characters’ relationships instead of building in a big cliffhanger. The future of most of the characters is hopeful and positive.

Only Ed’s (Seth MacFarlane) and Kelly’s (Adrianne Palicki) romantic relationship remains in limbo. It is also unclear where Ed’s daughter Anaya is at the end of Season 3. Her mother, Telaya, was captured by the Union, but still refused to hand Anaya over to Ed. Season 4 could at least clarify what happened to Anaya.