Seth MacFarlane Reveals Why The Orville Season 4 Still Hasn’t Happened After 4 Years

It sounds like The Orville may not have embarked on its final mission just yet. The Orville creator and star Seth MacFarlane is out promoting the new season of Ted, but offered an update on The Orville's future.

“I will be honest with you: Season 4 is written,” MacFarlane told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s just a question of when we have the time to produce it.”

Getting more specific, MacFarlane pointed to himself as the source of the problem. “The 10 scripts are done,” he said. “I’m the problem. It’s [a matter of] when I can make that my year, with all the other stuff we have in the works. But we can hit the ground running when it happens.”

MacFarlane does keep busy with a variety of projects. Perhaps the live-action Ted series wrapping up after Season 2 will free up some time in his schedule?

The Orville Season 4 Is Written

The Orville began life on the Fox network, and is a passion project for Seth MacFarlane. The series is set in the 25th century and follows the crew of the titular starship, the USS Orville, as they embark on missions on behalf of the Planetary Union, an alliance of like-minded species across the galaxy. MacFarlane is a die hard fan of Star Trek, particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The Orville was his attempt to recapture the magic of TNG's episodic sci-fi adventures, just with a slightly more comedic undertone.

And it succeeded, eventually. Most will agree that the first season of The Orville wasn't bad, but struggled to find a consistent tone, resulting in a "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, by the end of Season 1, the show had found its footing, and its two subsequent seasons earned 100% positive reviews on the aggregator.

However, while The Orville may have been trying to recapture the magic of a bygone era of television, it came with modern production costs. For its third season, The Orville jumped from Fox to Hulu and was rechristened The Orville: New Horizons. It then became one of the first Hulu shows to also become available to stream on Disney+.

The presumption has been that The Orville has always been on the edge of full cancellation due to its production costs, but that doesn't seem to be the case. MacFarlane in 2024 confirmed that he hadn't heard any such bad news from the higher-ups overseeing the show.

MacFarlane said, "The show is not dead," and that "Nobody has told me that it’s dead from the network, so we’re proceeding under those auspices.” He also said at the timet that they're "working on it," and it seems that work has continued if 10 new episodes of the show have been written and are just waiting to enter production. Whether that ever happens may depend on MacFarlane.

The Orville is streaming now on Hulu.