Trivia / The Orville

• Actor Allusion:
  • The cowboy outfits Ed wears in "About a Girl" and "Gently Falling Rain" are very similar to the costume Seth MacFarlane wore in A Million Ways to Die in the West.
  • Victor Garber, who played Admiral Halsey in the pilot, had been the warden of the Klingon prison colony Rura Penthe in a Deleted Scene from Star Trek (2009).
  • Brian George (Richard Bashir on DS9 and Ambassador O'Zaal on Star Trek: Voyager) had a guest role in the pilot.
  • Steven Culp (Major Hayes on Star Trek: Enterprise) plays an alien publicist in "Majority Rule".
  • Brian Thompson, who had several guest spots across the Trek franchise (being one of the biggest go-to "scary badass" guest actors of the '90s), plays an antagonist in "Into the Fold."
  • Robert Picardo (the Doctor program on Star Trek: Voyager) plays Alara's father.
  • Her mother was played by Molly Hagan, who played the first Vorta we ever saw on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
  • As noted in the Main page, co-star Penny Johnson Jerald had a recurring role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
  • John Billingsley, who played Dr. Phlox on Star Trek: Enterprise) plays a guest character with a grudge against Alara's father.
  • MacFarlane himself had made a cameo appearance as a crewmember in Star Trek: Enterprise.
  • Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi) plays a teacher aboard the Orville.
  • Bruce Boxleitner plays the president of an interstellar alliance in season 3.
• Actor-Shared Background: Ed's bad experience with pot as revealed in "Command Performance"^note once getting so high that he thought he would literally die if he remained seated is also really what happened to Seth MacFarlane, and is in fact the reason he no longer smokes it in real life.
• The Cast Show Off: Several actors/actresses on the show are talented musicians and singers, with several of them being given moments to sing (such as Bortus' concert in "A Tale Of Two Topas" and Gordon singing at least once a season).
• Channel Hop: The Orville will hop from Fox to Hulu for its third season. Word of God is this is so the crew can take the time they need to properly build up their ambitions for the season without worrying about a January deadline.
• Creator's Favorite: Seth MacFarlane has acknowledged in at least one interview that Teleya is one of his favorite characters on the show; this combined with Michaela McManus's performance convinced him to bring her back for Season 2.
• Creator's Oddball: This is the only serialized live action show that Seth MacFarlane has created, as opposed to his animated works, Family Guy, American Dad!, and The Cleveland Show. It also takes place in a serious setting that just happens to have a lot of jokes sprinkled into it, rather than just being a constant joke machine.
• Descended Creator: As is typical of Seth MacFarlane works. MacFarlane plays the protagonist, Captain Ed Mercer.
• Dueling Shows:
  • Emerged as a rival to Star Trek: Discovery for the first two seasons. One is a Work Com In Space heavily influenced by Star Trek and one plays it completely straight, both with a cast of veteran character actors, and both with vastly superior special effects to any previous Star Trek series. The fact the release of Discovery was delayed by nearly a full year resulted in the unintended scenario where The Orville debuted only two weeks before Discovery, leading to much head-to-head comparison of the two series. Expressed here as a variation on the "Distracted Boyfriend" meme. This became downplayed as the shows went on, both due to the huge Schedule Slip for The Orville and the massive expansion of the Star Trek franchise in the Paramount+ era, which made Discovery into just one facet of the franchise rather than its current central pillar; Trek also got its own Work Com entry with the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks.
  • The long-awaited New Horizons found a new rival in the form of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a Spin-Off of Discovery with a more traditional episodic format matching The Orville.
• Genius Bonus: The ship is named "The Orville" in reference to Orville Wright, one of the two Wright Brothers who pioneered heavier-than-air flight; Mercer has a model of the Wrights' plane on display on his desk.
• Inspiration for the Work: MacFarlane made the show primarily due to his dismay at the Darker and Edgier direction the sci-fi genre had taken, as an attempt to bring back a sense of optimism to it. It's worth repeating that The Orville was not created as an intentional counterpoint to Star Trek: Discovery; a year-long delay in Discovery's release resulted in the two shows going head to head.
• Looping Lines: Mark Jackson plays Isaac in the same way all the other actors play their characters - that's him in the full-body costume (he describes himself as a "puppeteer" and it is similar to Big Bird and other full-body Muppets) and he speaks all of his dialogue on-set (how his voice naturally sounds captured by live mics can be heard on the series gag reel). However, because the costume muffles his voice, he is forced to re-record all of his dialogue in ADR.
• Posthumous Credit:
  • Norm Macdonald passed away prior to Season 3's release, making this show one of the last works released after his death.
  • Lisa Banes, who played Speria Balask in Season 3, was killed in a traffic accident prior to her episodes being released.
• Production Posse: The show's production cast and crew are a marriage of production posses: an increasing number of Star Trek alumni as well as actors, writers, and producers from Seth MacFarlane's other projects.
  • Behind the scenes, Brannon Braga is an executive producer, Andre Bormanis (who served as a science consultant and story editor from Star Trek: The Next Generation all the way to Star Trek: Enterprise) is a supervising producer, and Robert Duncan McNeill, David A. Goodman, James Conway and Jonathan Frakes are involved as well.
  • Seth MacFarlane had previously gotten the chance with the crew from Star Trek: Enterprise through a guest role as an engineer aboard the Columbia.
  • Penny Johnson Jerald previously had a major recurring role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (as Kasidy Yates, Captain Sisko's love interest and eventual wife) and is a part of the main cast as Doctor Claire Finn.
  • Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, a producer and writer on Family Guy, is also a producer and writer on The Orville.
  • Scott Grimes and Seth MacFarlane work together on American Dad!.
  • Rachael MacFarlane, Seth's younger sister, provides the voice of The Orville's computer. She has a history of doing voice-acting for some of Seth's previous shows, most prominently as Hayley Smith from American Dad!.
  • Two of Seth's A Million Ways to Die in the West costars, Liam Neeson and Charlize Theron, have made appearances.
  • Several actors with Star Trek credentials made appearances. Season 1 included Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voyager) and Steven Culp (Star Trek: Enterprise). Likewise, Season 2 has one-episode guest appearances by John Billingsley (Star Trek: Enterprise), Tim Russ (Star Trek: Voyager), and Marina Sirtis (Star Trek: The Next Generation).
  • Mike Henry (Cleveland Brown and a few other notable Family Guy characters) plays Dann, a recurring engineer.
• Real-Life Relative: Much of the cast are made up of Seth MacFarlane's personal friends:
  • He has been friends with Scott Grimes for over 20 years, although of course the two have since worked together in American Dad! and then Family Guy. MacFarlane had to fight for Grimes to be cast as Malloy, a role he wrote specifically for him, who wasn't cast until the two submitted an informal screen test to network executives.
  • MacFarlane has also been friends with Adrianne Palicki for over 10 years, the two having met at an Entertainment Weekly party and then campaigned for Barack Obama together. Again, Palicki was his first choice for Grayson, and given her ample and recent experience in the genre and on network television, she was presumably a much easier sell to network executives.
  • Although he technically met J. Lee when he started working as an intern at Fuzzy Door Productions, the two became fast friends (they, along with Grimes and Palicki, are all part of the same social circle). Lee being even more obscure than Grimes (a veteran TV actor since childhood), MacFarlane couldn't even offer him the part informally, persuading Lee to go through the formal audition process before he was cast.
  • MacFarlane likes to cast his girlfriends as regulars on the show: Halston Sage was part of the original cast (and then left the show after they broke up), and then Anne Winters joined the show in season 3. Even Jessica Szohr, who replaced Sage, was an ex-girlfriend of MacFarlane's who joined the cast in season 2.
  • Seth's sister Rachael voices the Orville's computer.
• Recycled Set:
  • Ed and Kelly's offices are the same set with the furniture rearranged.
  • In season 3, the same set is used to depict different Moclan bases, one a classified torture site and the other a publically known science outpost. The former uses red lighting, the latter blue lighting.
• Romance on the Set:
  • Seth MacFarlane and Halston Sage were in a relationship during the first season, after their breakup she left the show and was replaced by Jessica Szohr, who had been in a relationship with Seth years before.
  • For Season three the role of new main character Ensign Burke is filled by Anne Winters, who MacFarlane started dating in 2019.
  • Scott Grimes and Adrianne Palicki were revealed to be dating when the cast appeared at ComiCon, and eventually got married but then separated just months into the marriage.
• Schedule Slip: Due to the scale of Seth MacFarlane's ambitions for this show, the series hasn't been able to stick to a regular yearly release schedule. This contributed to The Orville's Channel Hop to Hulu, as an online streamer simply has to release episodes rather than find space in a broadcast schedule. There was an 18-month gap between Seasons 1 and 2 and a whopping three-year gap between Seasons 2 and 3 because COVID-19 caused a production stoppage followed by the release date being pushed back a further three months.^note For perspective, during that time, the Star Trek franchise saw third and fourth seasons of Discovery, the first season of Star Trek: Picard and the start of a second, the start of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the first two seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks and the first season of Star Trek: Prodigy.
• Scully Box: Seth MacFarlane is one inch shorter than Statuesque Stunner Adrianne Palicki but he's an inch taller due to his boots in the show.
• Spoiled by the Cast List: Purposely averted for the appearances of Dolly Parton and Halston Sage in their respective episodes of "Midnight Blue" and "Future Unknown," with them both receiving Special Guest Star credits at the beginning of the closing credits.
• Technology Marches On: Since the communicator from Star Trek: The Original Series predicted/inspired the cell phone, it appears that the commscanner every crewmember has is an Expy of the smartphone by combining the functions of a communicator and a tricorder/scanner.
• Troubled Production: Getting Season 3 finished proved to be much tougher than anticipated due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. First, the show was hit with a months-long forced shutdown in the middle of filming. When production resumed, precautions needed to be taken to make sure no one got infected. However, this made the make-up process more arduous for cast members playing aliens. Also, new pandemic-related rules meant that only 30 actors could shoot a scene at once, which put a spanner in Seth MacFarlane's hope to have scenes featuring more than one hundred people. Undaunted, he decided to achieve those shots using visual effects, which added to the workload of the effects houses already going full bore to complete complex sequences. The decision was also made to shoot every remaining episode simultaneously, which was draining for the cast and crew. Luckily, everyone involved was hellbent on making things work and banded together to complete production.
• What Could Have Been: According to Midnight's Edge, Seth MacFarlane pitched a new Star Trek series to CBS in 2014, which would have been a sequel to the TNG era. But it was obviously rejected. It's likely at least some elements of this pitch made it into The Orville.
• Word of God:
  • According to Supervising Producer Andre Bormanis (also a long-time Star Trek science advisor), the fuzzy material that covers the Orville's bulkheads is organic matter that absorbs the carbon dioxide exhaled by the crew and releases oxygen back into the ship.
  • Seth MacFarlane says that Bortus is actually speaking English, rather than speaking his native tongue while using a translator, and his stilted demeanor comes from not being fully comfortable communicating in his second language.
• You Look Familiar: Michaela McManus played the Krill Teleya in Season 1 and returned, sans alien makeup, to play the human Lieutenant Tyler in Season 2. Oddly enough, there's a reason for this: Tyler is Teleya under extensive surgical alteration, as revealed in "Nothing Left on Earth Excepting Fishes".

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