My Grandma mistook "The Orville" for a new "Star Trek" show

[Mojochi]

It's just an opinion, but I think it's ill advised to use Star Trek to build up your streaming service, because while the fanbase for Star Trek is big, vocal, & net active, it was also historically not able to keep some shows on the air because of how easily broken up it can get. Of any cross-section of self-proclaimed Star Trek fans, you find all manner of people who get different experiences from it, with different tastes, some of whom don't even like all of the shows, & of those, can't even agree upon which shows are the ones that are more likable. I could grab 5 of any of you here, & it's exceedingly likely none would agree which show is the best & what constitutes a poor Star Trek production, & that's the core fan base.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it does hold potential for divisiveness. Couple that with the fact the most success Trek ever had was on tv, or in cinemas, when it had its broadest appeal among people who aren't die hard fans. So the problem with restricting your viewership should be abundantly evident. To be blunt, if you ask people to pay outright, you lose cheap people. If you ask them to subscribe to a service, you lose lazy people, & if you operate outside of commonplace mainstream outlets, you cause confusion & lose ignorant people (Ignorant as it applies to Star Trek &/or media)

I got news for you. Those people who aren't die hard fans? whose (Not so insignificant) contribution brought Trek its broadest successes? Those people are cheap, lazy & ignorant. Add to that the fact that there's an easily accessible production out there that literally mimics Star Trek, & you can count on the cheap & lazy people thinking it's a better alternative, & risk the ignorant people not even knowing the bloody difference. lol. I don't even think this show can count on the die hard fan base all tuning in, because some of us object to their viewership restrictions on principle. We're patrons of Star Trek, not CBS, the more CBS chops up the thing we love on the chopping block, the more likely we're to pass. It's a stunt, a weak one, that shows the flop sweat of losing out to things like netflix

 

[woodstock]

Is there a separate thread that discusses the merits, or lack thereof, of The Orville?

 

[Brennyren]

The Discovery forum has "Discovery vs. The Orville." The Science Fiction & Fantasy forum has several Orville threads, including a general news one, one about the ships and technology, and threads specifically focusing on each of the last three or four episodes, with ratings and commentary.

 

[jsp3970]

I was recently asked what I thought of The Orville. I described it as a dysfunctional Star Trek TNG but that I also enjoyed watching it.

 

[woodstock]

I'm only four episodes in right now, but I've been surprised by the sophistication of the plots. I don't know if they go in too much depth as far as the Union's makeup or the training of ship crews, but they don't have the military discipline that Star Trek characters have. These also aren't enlightened utopian humans, they're more like ordinary people, and I have seen threads on this forum discussing these kinds of "what ifs", so I hope no one is knocking it too hard.

 

[ichab]

Orville is truer to the spirit of Star Trek than some Star Trek shows have been.

To each his own. IMO it's nothing more than a cheap parody of TNG.

 

[dswynne1]

So, what if the Orville did become a Star Trek show? For fun, if Paramount/CBS bought the show from Fox, how could it be done? What changes would be made? Most likely, they'd shelved the entire first season, change the uniforms a bit (probably switch color schemes and add the arrow delta), and set the show in the post-NEM era. The Krill would be the primary antagonists, still. And they'd drastically tone down the humor a bit more. They would keep the existing ship design as some sort of "new" engine type.

 

[galad2003]

So, what if the Orville did become a Star Trek show? For fun, if Paramount/CBS bought the show from Fox, how could it be done? What changes would be made? Most likely, they'd shelved the entire first season, change the uniforms a bit (probably switch color schemes and add the arrow delta), and set the show in the post-NEM era. The Krill would be the primary antagonists, still. And they'd drastically tone down the humor a bit more. They would keep the existing ship design as some sort of "new" engine type.

I hope they never do this, especially the bolded part. While the humor isn't the greatest, it is what separates this show from other Trek for me and makes it fresh for me.

I am perfectly happy with this show existing in it's own universe separate from Trek. It gets to be like Trek but free from the canon so it can build it's own. Some sort of alternate universe crossover for an episode would be cool but please no permanent merger.

 

[ChasFink]

So, what if the Orville did become a Star Trek show?

The first episode after the merger would involve time travel with an internally contradictory logic. It would have someone from the main Trek timeline going back in time, screwing something up, and making the Union rather than the Federation the home of human society. Then, while trying to fix it, the two universes get overlaid, and the Union space fleet becomes a strange little cousin of Starfleet. There will probably also be an alien enemy (singular or plural) with ridiculously godlike powers who would certainly be impossible to vanquish in real life but will prove no match for the combined crews of the Orville and the Enterprise-G. When all this makes viewership go down, an all-out war will break out with the Krill and the show will go into serial mode rather than single-shot episodes. No one who misses an episode will be able to understand the story anymore, and the show will be cancelled.

Five years later, people would post here about how much they miss the show.