‘The Orville’ Season 4 Is Written, Can Return to Hulu

Seth MacFarlane‘s The Orville may be ready to take flight again.

MacFarlane, who is promoting Thursday’s launch for the second season of Peacock series Ted, tells The Hollywood Reporter that the writing team behind The Orville has penned 10 episodes for a potential fourth season. MacFarlane created and stars in the sci-fi series that aired its first two seasons on Fox before moving to Hulu for a third run that debuted in June 2022.

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

The prolific producer confirmed that Hulu would be ready to move forward on the new season, but his own packed schedule has made it challenging to find time for him to shoot. “The 10 scripts are done,” MacFarlane continues. “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.”

Set in the 25th century, The Orville premiered on Fox in 2017 and centers on the exploits for the crew of the USS Orville spacecraft, with MacFarlane’s Capt. Ed Mercer leading the way. The season three cast included Adrianne Palicki, Penny Johnson Jerald, Scott Grimes, Peter Macon, Jessica Szohr and Anne Winters.

Back in 2022, MacFarlane told THR that he and his co-stars were hoping for Hulu to agree to make more episodes, despite hurdles that included the cast’s contracts having expired after season three. He also acknowledged that the show’s budget was a factor.

“I would love it,” the star said of continuing The Orville. “I know the entire cast is hoping for it. It’s a big question mark for a lot of reasons. It’s not an inexpensive show to produce. It requires an ambitious budget. But the flip side of that is, it’s no more ambitious than half the other streaming shows on television. It really is going to depend on audience response, on whether the show gets discovered.”

Later, during a 2024 conversation timed to the debut of Ted’s first season, the Family Guy creator told THR cagily of The Orville, “All I can say is that the show is not officially ended.”

In a podcast interview from late 2023, Palicki suggested that she would be unlikely to return as Cmdr. Kelly Grayson for a fourth season.

“No longer doing that,” the actress said about The Orville before noting that she didn’t know whether it would come back. Palicki explained that it was tough to make herself available for shooting, given the long production breaks: “It became an actual, real issue because there would be so much time in between seasons. Seth wanted to write everything himself, so it would just take so much time.” She added, “I did love so many things about it. I think it was the process that was hard.”