‘Star Trek Discovery’, ‘The Orville’ set for TV launch
WITH the first season of the series Star Trek Discovery appearing weekly on Netflix from September 24 until November 2017 and the next one continuing in January 2018, fans are gearing up for all things sci-fi.
However as the world clamours for this first Star Trek series in more than decade, a streamlined usurper with no interest in Klingons is now entering the space race.
Sci-fi parody The Orville, from Emmy award-winning Seth MacFarlane, debuts on US television channel Fox two weeks before Star Trek Discovery and critics have been remarking on the striking similarities.
Squint and you might think The Orville, which debuts on September 10, was a re-run of The Next Generation, save for the blue uniforms.
When it was presented at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Los Angeles recently, journalists wondered aloud if Fox was worried about being sued.
“Seth’s intention is to do something that clearly pays homage to Star Trek, that clearly was inspired a lot by Star Trek,” Fox Television Group chairman and CEO Dana Walden said.
Walden said no one associated with “Star Trek” would think of the similarities between the two shows as “anything other than a compliment”.
Set 400 years in the future, MacFarlane’s series follows the exploits of the USS. Orville, an exploratory ship with a crew facing the wonders and dangers of space, as well as more mundane problems.
Down on his luck after a bitter divorce, Planetary Union officer Ed Mercer, played by MacFarlane, finally gets the chance to command his own ship.
Determined to prove his worth, his first setback comes when the first officer assigned to his ship turns out to be his ex-wife Kelly (Adrianne Palicki).
As the new commander, Ed assembles a qualified but odd-looking crew, including Bortus, an alien from a singlespecies, Isaac, an artificial life-form from a machine society and Yaphit, a gelatinous creature.
It’s not just the premise of The Orville that has the ring of familiarity.
Many of its crew members are Star Trek alumni going back decades, including veteran producer Brannon Braga, an intern on The Next Generation in 1990 who worked his way up to becoming a key creative figure on three of the franchise’s four modern series. — AFP