‘The Orville’ Season 4 Teased by Seth MacFarlane

The Orville began on Fox in 2017 as a gentle parody of Star Trek, with Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane (as Captain Ed Mercer) leading a rag-tag crew of misfits into the deeper reaches of space, with plenty of quips and jokes to spare. Sometime around the second season, which aired on Fox in 2019, the show transformed from parody into homage, and by the time it was retooled as The Orville: New Horizons for Hulu in 2022, it had become its own earnest, space-faring beast of a sci-fi adventure.

Since then, all has been quiet, despite continued pleas from fans to bring the show back for more. While promoting the second season of his series Ted, MacFarlane gave the most positive update on the show in a while, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I will be honest with you: Season four is written,” MacFarlane said. “It’s just a question of when we have the time to produce it.”

Between Family Guy, American Dad, and Ted, MacFarlane is indeed busy, but it’s nice to hear him say that The Orville season 4 is this far along, since many fans are at a point where they’ve given up hope. “The 10 scripts are done,” MacFarlane continued. “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.”

Seth MacFarlane Keeps Hope Alive for ‘The Orville’ Season 4

Hulu

It’s been hard to get a bead on the fate of The Orville season 4, since various cast and crew members have said conflicting things about it in the years since the finale of New Horizons. Last we checked in, back in April of 2025, star Adrianne Palicki (Kelly Grayson) didn’t sound hopeful. “You know, right before the [2023 writers] strikes, that was definitely a conversation that Seth and I had,” she said. “He called me and asked if I would do it, and it was a possibility, and then the strikes happened. It kind of just went away. I know a lot of people are disappointed about that, but as of now, I don’t know that there’s going to be a fourth season.”

But MacFarlane himself is now making it sound like the only thing holding up the show is his own schedule, which can presumably open up if he cares to make it happen. And it does seem like he cares about the show: he writes a lot of the episodes himself, and even penned a novella called The Orville: Sympathy for the Devil, which came out during the run of New Horizons.

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New Horizons ended with a relaxed episode that could serve as a series finale if it has to, but there were also many storylines left unexplored, including a new alliance between the Federation-esque Planetary Union and the robotic Kaylon people, who before that had been the main antagonists of the series. Meanwhile, the sexist Moclan people had teamed up with the religiously fervent Krill, giving our heroes a clear enemy going forward.

We’ll watch and wait to see if anything happens. In the meanwhile, all eight episodes of the second season of Ted will drop on Peacock on Sunday, March 5.