Making The Orville Better in Season 2

Fox's The Orville wrapped up its season last month.  Some people like this show and some people (Nigel Mitchell and Chris Dilloway) loathe it.  I think it's OK but it has room for improvement.

What I think mostly--and I'm sure I'm not alone--is that going into season 2 they need to decide what kind of show they want to be.  The first season was mostly a laid back off-brand version of Star Trek:  The Next Generation.  Some people find that comforting for nostalgia reasons and others loathe it as unoriginal.  And then there are those (critics, mostly) who mistake this for an attempt at a "parody" or "spoof" of ST TNG.  The reason they misunderstand this is because the show stars Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy, American Dad, and Ted.  And naturally he brings some of that smartass humor to the show.  But that shouldn't be construed as a parody or a spoof.  MacFarlane recusing himself from the show would be a good step to solve that problem.  I think a more minor step in the right direction is getting rid of the helmsman guy played by Scott Grimes, who also does voice work on American Dad.  Besides being comic relief his character really has no depth or purpose.  So you ditch him (maybe let him make a heroic sacrifice like Alan Tudyk in Serenity) and that takes away the comic relief, allowing the show to get a bit more serious.  And then critics might not be misrepresenting it as much as parody or a spoof.

The next thing you need to do is invest in your characters.  I think one of the better episodes was when the doctor and Isaac the android were stranded on a remote planet.  We learned more about the doctor and her unconventional (by our standards) family and Isaac learned not to resent human kids as much.  They need to do more of that to build the characters.

Another thing I hope they do is ditch the "will they/won't they" bullshit between the captain and first officer.  This isn't Friends or Saved By the Bell for fuck's sake!  These are supposed to be professional people.  But if you still want the romance they can do what I did in the second book of my Rebirth series called The Savior:  turn that duo into a trio!  In the first book of that series the captain and a young ensign were stranded on a planet together and they got a little bit of a thing going.  Though once they got a new ship they put it on ice, though the ensign was still pining for the captain.  Then in the second book a new helmsman comes on board who's an old flame of the captain from when they served together years ago.  So then it became kind of a love triangle, though not all sides were necessarily touching each other.  It'd be super easy to do this even without killing the helmsman (see above) because they moved the navigator guy to chief engineer, which means you have a vacancy on the bridge.  So instead of just using random fill-ins you bring in an old flame of the captain or first officer and then you've got a love triangle.  One that probably won't end like mine where the helmsman died heroically during an epic space battle.

Those are some things I think can help the show.  Some originality in the stories would be nice too.  I mean the last 4 episodes or so especially weren't all that great.  There was one where they went to a planet like 21st Century Earth where everything is run by a system of likes that's almost identical to a Black Mirror episode.  Then there was the one where the security girl faces all these fears and finds herself alone on the ship that was pretty much a mix of a couple of ST TNG episodes.  The season finale was kind of blah where the first officer becomes a "god" to people on a planet.  They already did the anti-religious thing in an earlier episode and then having Isaac stay on the planet was like the crappy ST TNG two-parter "Time's Arrow."  So they need to find some new ideas that also help to build their characters.  Then some of the haters might stop hating.  Or probably not.