I miss the longer seasons. Waiting over a year until the next season seems like a long time. It was nice to only wait a few months. I'm sure the actors prefer the shorter seasons though. They also can have a higher budget for effects with 10 episodes. What are your thoughts on this?
In terms of story content, people have conjured up the notion that fewer episodes means less filler and the story arcs can be tighter. That's not always true. "The Orville" season 2 had - what - three arcs, of which one ended abruptly, another went on far longer than it should, and I don't even recall the third. And they still make filler episodes like the grossly-overrated cell phone episode, which definitely feels like a toddlerized amalgamation of a couple TNG scripts but with nothing really innovative added (a first for the show, sadly), but at least we can all dance to it with the other 21st century people in it - and they act almost no differently than the Orville crew's allegedly 25th century time period. Whatever happened to season 3, the one that was still slated for 2021 release despite the cooties? (Looked up: It's March 2022... cool... will it be on their regular $10/mo plan or the $50/mo plan? Probably the latter as the cheap plan covers only the legacy library and not new material and the show isn't cheap to produce... I just looked that up, it's now $64 for the new stuff with ads or $71 without ads... Or rather, $69 or $75 respectively since prices are going up in December 2021 according to their site...
https://help.hulu.com/s/article/how-much-does-hulu-cost )
Effects, great or otherwise, are pointless if the underlying story isn't all that good, nobody knows early on what read real good on paper translated into something great on screen, though nobody's going to complain over how much money they put into the f/x no matter what. But before I wander through digressionville, let's put this in an allegorical setting:
Bake two cakes - one has decent icing but made with the freshest and other most adjective-laden core ingredients. The other cake has really great adjective-laden icing but uses gone-off eggs, sour milk, years' old wheat, I'm sure you see where this should-be-cliche is going: The best icing ever isn't saving that cake that's not embracing your palette (but the bakery is loaded with all sorts of different confectioneries so it's not that big a deal, unless you get food poisoning.) But that cake with the great core ingredients seems a lot tastier with the best icing, though any icing can do. But if you're putting in an effort, go genuinely in and all the way if you can.
Or if you're at an age where CGI looks sweet. Like when "The Mind's Eye" VHS tape series of computer graphics came out and people gawked for the sake of it. Even those not addicted to acid/LSD/etc:
Swap out the soundtrack to the release of "Freedom Rock" for the best effect:
