"The Orville". A Seth McFarlane Space Adventure on Fox

jts1031 said:
Seth MacFarlane has said a few times on Twitter that one of the primary reasons for moving to Hulu was that they now have the freedom to tell a story without time constraints. If the story takes 37 minutes to tell, they don't have to do filler. If it's a 68 minutes story, they get the time to tell that and don't have to cut things. The only advantage to Hulu Live really is that you get local channels included, and that's why I went with it.
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So that’s actually a really interesting aspect...it will be nice to potentially get an episode that’s more than one current length episodes, but less than two current length episodes. Seems it gives them a bit more freedom to tell the story how they want to tell it.
 
jts1031 said:
Seth MacFarlane has said a few times on Twitter that one of the primary reasons for moving to Hulu was that they now have the freedom to tell a story without time constraints. If the story takes 37 minutes to tell, they don't have to do filler. If it's a 68 minutes story, they get the time to tell that and don't have to cut things. The only advantage to Hulu Live really is that you get local channels included, and that's why I went with it.
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I had not heard of this before- it will be interesting to see episodes that are not unnaturally stuffed or truncated to fit broadcast restrictions.
 
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Treadwell said:
"Having the time to tell the story" is a double-edged sword, because there is a beneficial aspect to time constraints, in that they force you to focus on what's important to the story and cut the fat.
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True.
IMO most Steven King novels would be improved by being 2/3s shorter

I guess we shall see if having a more flexible length format helps or hurts the story when season 3 starts up
 
Cephus said:
Which is exactly why I stopped reading Stephen King. His early novels were concise and to the point. Today, they're laughably bloated. That's what happens when you become too famous for editors to tell you to knock it off.
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Wih the original release of the Stand that is exactly what happened. Because he wasn't that famous yet the publisher cut out a lot they didn't consider important to the story. Later on he was able to release it the way he originally wrote it. It is hard to say which one was better as I liked both of them but I think in this case the longer told a better story as a lot of things were fleshed out that in the shorter version were almost throw away lines without any context.
 
I can understand wanting to tell a complete story with fleshed out scenes and characters. My problem is that King tends to overindulge in this t the point the main story seems just an excuse to explore each character and location backstory- there needs to be a balance.
When I read his book 'The Dome', which had a fascinating premise, I felt I was spending more time reading about everyone felt about everything and less about what was really interesting. The ironic thing is that that bloated book was picked up for a two season TV series which filled up the story even more.

Back on Topic
I think this new season of 'The Orville' may be the first series I know of where variable episode length may be used. It will be very interesting to see how they take advantage of that.
 
Richard Baker said:
...I think this new season of 'The Orville' may be the first series I know of where variable episode length may be used. It will be very interesting to see how they take advantage of that.
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Longmire's first three seasons were aired on A&E, and the last three on Netflix. While it was on A&E the episodes lengths varied by only two or three minutes, but on Netflix they varied by as much as 20 minutes. So The Orville wouldn't be the first series to feature variable episode lengths, but the whole streaming thing is still relatively new so it might become more common as time passes and production companies get more comfortable with not being restrained to 30 and/or 60 minute episodes.
 
I remember when album music was limited to about 20 minutes per side.
Then CDs came along and broke that barrier and songs could exceed that 20 min cap and take as long as they needed to to realize the full composition uninterrupted.
 
Zombie_61 said:
Longmire's first three seasons were aired on A&E, and the last three on Netflix. While it was on A&E the episodes lengths varied by only two or three minutes, but on Netflix they varied by as much as 20 minutes. So The Orville wouldn't be the first series to feature variable episode lengths, but the whole streaming thing is still relatively new so it might become more common as time passes and production companies get more comfortable with not being restrained to 30 and/or 60 minute episodes.
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Also depends on if they have syndication in mind or not. If you do, it's a LOT harder to have varying lengths as stations will force edits, etc, or simply not pick it up.
 
The scope of the Orville really ramped up last season. The music is just phenomenal. Once he quit trying to make it a comedy it became the awesome sci-fi it is and it blows kisses to all of the great fiction I grew up with. Me and the wife call it the best star trek on Tv.
 
Richard Baker said:
IMO it is still a comedy but the humor is more character driven and takes a back seat to the primary story.
It is one of the very few shows I really look forward to watching
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And that is exactly what made all of the pre JJTrek Star Trek shows good. They were not comedies but they had humor in them to take some of the bite out of the drama. That is something that is lost in this era of GOT, I'm talking to you STD, that The Orville understands and got very good at last season. Just the site of Bortus lighting up a cigarette with his pistol was enough to crack me up without it being over the top.
 
AJK001 said:
And that is exactly what made all of the pre JJTrek Star Trek shows good. They were not comedies but they had humor in them to take some of the bite out of the drama. That is something that is lost in this era of GOT, I'm talking to you STD, that The Orville understands and got very good at last season. Just the site of Bortus lighting up a cigarette with his pistol was enough to crack me up without it being over the top.
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I'd say this era of Walking Dead. GOT has lots of funny moments - TWD is utterly joyless, 100% tedious melodrama.

On topic, I hope I'll still have the option to watch Orville on xbox, 'cause I'm not paying for another streaming service.
 
D28910BE-435D-4723-AB24-DD783DB84C7F.jpeg

I got the Hero Collector Orville today. It’s pretty cool!
 

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