Co-star Scott Grimes has said that The Orville season 4 will finally go before cameras in early 2025.
Almost exactly two years after the final episode of series 3 aired, The Orville co-star Scott Grimes has talked about the long-awaited season 4, which he says will officially go into production in January or February 2025.
First airing in 2017, The Orville is showrunner and star Seth MacFarlane’s affectionate take on the Star Trek franchise – a comedic space opera in which the Family Guy creator plays Captain Ed Mercer aboard the titular exploratory vessel, the USS Orville. Spanning 36 episodes across its three seasons to date, the series really found its footing from season 2 onwards, and it’s seemingly been a minor ratings hit for its streaming platform, Hulu (which took over from Fox after the first season).
MacFarlane’s ongoing busy slate – he’s heading up a reboot of The Naked Gun starring Liam Neeson, among other things – and the expense of producing the show has cast the future of The Orville in doubt, however. Talking to the Inside Of You podcast (as reported by TheWrap), co-star Adrienne Palicki described shooting the show as “difficult”, and that MacFarlane’s insistence on writing all the episodes himself meant that there have been long gaps between seasons; actors were also contracted to keep themselves available to reprise their roles in future runs without pay.
If what Grimes has said is correct, however, the shoot of The Orville’s fourth season could be a matter of months away. Grimes, who co-stars as Lieutenant Gordon Malloy in the show, told attendees at the Star Trek Las Vegas convention about its status; neither Hulu nor MacFarlane have officially confirmed the show’s return, though the latter has made positive noises about the possibility in the past.
“All I can tell you is that there is no official death certificate for The Orville,” MacFarlane told TheWrap earlier in 2024. “It is still with us. I can’t go any further than that at the moment. There are too many factors.”
More on The Orville’s potential season 4 as we get it.
