Actually, I think the plan has always been that season 1 would just be thirteen episodes regardless if the show is cancelled or renewed for a second season.
News Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville
- Thread starter Kai "the spy"
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That's tokenism. The real test is to strip out the top three men and the top three women and then see what you have left. If the show isn't sexist, you should have roughly equal numbers of male and female characters in diverse roles. If you have way more men or primarily wives and mothers, you know they screwed the pooch (metaphorically) and there is casual (i.e. they don't even notice that they're doing it) sexism.
So, in other words, there is no "Real test", there is only what somebody who thinks everything is about genital equality.
How in the world is it tokenism when the two best written/most interesting characters are female?
Uhura was a token on more than one count, as was Sulu, and Chekov, and Scotty. Grayson and Alara? Sorry I'm not seeing it.
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I'm a fan of the Bechdel-Wallace test. I love The Orville, but it definitely fails that test. So while I don't think it's tokenism, as these characters are integral to the show, there could still be more representation. I'd like to see some non-binary crew, myself.
I guess there's precedent for Fox. The first season of Sleepy Hollow was only 13 episodes long and that was for a series that premiered at the start of the 2013/2014 ratings period with good ratings.
Pretty sure it's a foregone conclusion that not all genitals are created equal.
As has already been stated, you don't sit down to watch a Seth MacFarlane show expecting it to be about gender equality or anything like that. As it is, Orville is doing a much better job with its female characters than Family Guy does with theirs. Kelly and Alara are the show's real action heroes, and while Kelly might to a degree be "the wife" as you put it, there is much more to the character which if it weren't for the repeated references to her and Ed having been married, I'd probably have forgotten it by now. Now compare that to Family Guy, where the female leads are a hot wife who for some inexplicable reason puts up with an ignorant oaf who doesn't appreciate her, and a teenage loser who is the butt of all the show's most cruelest jokes. Hell, you want to bring in MacFarlane's other shows, American Dad is the exact same set up while Cleveland Show shakes things up a bit by having the teenage daughter be a popular girl.
Orville has three female characters in its main cast, two of which are the most interesting characters on the show, and the other does get some good material when she is on screen, plus most recent episode there was a female admiral. Now, let's look again at Family Guy, where the only female characters in the supporting cast really are wives and mothers of other characters, snooty popular girls at school and a Hispanic maid who is in fact voiced by a male voice actor.
Could Orville do a better job with its female characters? Maybe, but it's not doing a bad job, and compared to MacFarlane's other work, this show is a shining paragon of how women should be depicted on TV.
Pretty sure that foregone conclusion is s a foregone conclusion. Lest we live in a Bortus world.
Perhaps my terminology is off. The 'Smurfette Syndrome' is another term to depict a common theme throughout the sixties to the nineties where being a woman was enough to be a defining trait for one of the characters. We're beyond that now thanks to shows like Xena, Buffy, Alias, and so on. It's now more common for the female main characters to be the leads, and to be more complex and more interesting than the men. It's also still very common for those women to be exceptions to the overall casting and for there to be two or three times as many men as women. When there is a woman, she's far more likely to be in the role of a love interest or a mother for one of the male characters than merely a warrior, politician, or to move the plot along.
I think genre shows still struggle with balanced casting. On Star Trek TOS, for example, it was expressly stated that a third of the crew was female but how many landing parties reflected that? If you exclude occasions when a fiendish alien kidnapped women and forced them into landing parties, or when the entire crew was forced off the ship, I can think only of one, in Shore Leave.
The Orville has three women and seven men in the main recurring cast, so while those women may be awesome, it doesn't change the fact that the show is perpetuating the 50 year old tried and tested gender bias. After it's first couple of episodes smashed a couple of long overdue taboos, it's disappointing to see them slip back into the old mold.
It looks like Discovery is trying a bit harder but I've yet to get a firm grip on who the recurring characters are going to be.
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I was about to post almost this exact same thing.
The Gifted which also airs on Fox is only 10 episodes. Fox's Empire has just 18 per season. shorter seasons runs on Fox is pretty normal.
I think it passed the test in "Command Performance", with Alara expressing her lack of confidence to Dr. Finn. But Bechdel is a pretty low threshold.
One can split hairs about how much of the conversation between Kitan and Grayson in "Pria" was actually "talking about men" - Grayson was pursuing a legitimate - and correct - security concern. Kitan brought up the personal conflict angle and Grayson dismissed it, and was right to do so.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the Bechdel test is a steaming pile of shit. A female dominated movie like Gravity actually fails the test while a movie that is otherwise sexist garbage can pass the test just by having a ten minute scene in which two female characters talk about shoes. Why this continuously gets held up as the gauge of sexual equality I'll never understand.
I think it has less to do with a test of equality, and more to do with having prominent female characters whose existence precedes essence. Think of how many movies and TV shows from the first 3/4 of the 20th century would only make a character female if she was needed as a love interest, or a victim, or a sex object, etc. The point of the Bechdel test is that this still goes on, but in a more subtle way.
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Exactly. The test is a good indicator of whether or not a female character is her own fully realized self, or just a part of the furniture.
See also: Summer blockbusters with budgets exceeding 150 million dollars.