The Orville Season 3 - What We Know So Far

Set aboard an exploratory spaceship that's part of the 25th century Planetary Union, The Orville finds its crew visiting distant planets and helping its inhabitants with their problems, all while dealing with their own personal, petty workplace issues. Creator Seth MacFarlane stars as Captain Ed Mercer, alongside Adrianne Palicki as first officer (and Ed's ex-wife) Kelly Grayson. Rounding out the cast are various other humanoid, alien, and android beings who call the ship home.

The Orville is a unique blend of high-stakes life-and-death drama, workplace comedy, and random silliness, all in service of allegorical science-fiction plots that have something to say about human nature or the real world. It's all a delicate balance inside of a Star Trek: The Next Generation framework, and it took someone with the TV clout of Seth MacFarlane to get the show on the air in the first place. Fox has aired two seasons of the series, and there's more on the way. Here's everything we know about the third season of The Orville.

The Orville moving from the bright lights of a primetime slot on Fox to a television streaming service isn't a demotion. In fact, it seems to be a mutually beneficial business decision which gives Seth MacFarlane some breathing room. In addition to serving as a producer and voice actor on Family Guy and American Dad, helping to bring another season of the educational series Cosmos to the air, and picking up side gigs as a singer and performer in projects like The Loudest Voice, MacFarlane works very hard on The Orville. He's its chief creative architect, as well as its lead actor, executive producer, and frequent episode writer and director. In short, he's a busy man.

"My friends at the network understood what I was trying to do with this series, and they've done a spectacular job of marketing, launching and programming it for these past two seasons," MacFarlane said in a statement about the move. He added that because of the show's "ambitious" sci-fi plots and the amount of work it takes to make those into television, he "would not be able to deliver episodes until 2020, which would be challenging for the network." The solution: Hulu, where new episodes of The Orville will appear in late 2020, unencumbered by the seasonal scheduling parameters of a major network.

There's no telling exactly where season 3 of The Orville will venture to, apart from visiting new alien planets full of interesting lifeforms each week. However, the show will likely have to address some pretty major developments that occurred toward the end of its last season. With episodes like the two-part "Identity," The Orville ventured far away from its comic elements and standalone episode nature and more toward dark, dramatic storylines that play out over multiple installments. In "Identity," artificial lifeform Isaac goes dark, and the Orville goes to his home world of Kaylon 1 — not in the Planetary Union — hoping to revive him. Isaac comes back to life, but his coworkers uncover grisly evidence that the denizens of this robot planet rose up and killed the biological race that created them... which they plan to do with Earth after wrestling away control of the Orville. All is well in the end, but only after a massive battle, likely casting a permanent dark shadow over Isaac. 

The second season of The Orville ended on something of a cliffhanger, the result of an elaborate plot involving an altered timeline. By the end, Earth had been destroyed, memory wipes had been botched, and the USS Orville may have been destroyed. A third season will probably find some way to undo a lot of all that.

The third season of The Orville is quite far away. New episodes won't debut until the latter days of 2020. As of the summer of 2019, the show's writers were still crafting scripts, so until there are some leaks, fans will just have to count down the days until the end of next year. However, producers both thanked fans and whetted their appetites for the show's future Hulu-bound episodes at San Diego Comic-Con with an elaborate interactive exhibit called "The Orville Experience." 

Held just outside of the pop culture convention, Orville fans got to take a deep dive into all things Orville for free. A number of show personnel were on hand, including visual effects producer Brooke Noska, producer/director Jon Cassar, and executive producer Tom Constantino. But the real attractions were all the actual screen-used props, models, costumes, and ray-guns. Fans could even get their picture taken with Unk, the alien blob creature and lieutenant engineer (he's the guy who hooked up Bortus with his pornographic "simulations"). Also of interest: Bortus' actual (and hilarious) mustache and the intricately designed scale model of the USS Orville.