Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 58 | Seth MacFarlane on Using Science Fiction to Explore Humanity

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Fiction shines a light on the human condition by putting people into imaginary situations and envisioning what might happen. Science fiction expands this technique by considering situations in the future, with advanced technology, or with utterly different social contexts. Seth MacFarlane's show The Orville is good old-fashioned space opera, but it's also a laboratory for exploring the intricacies of human behavior. There are interpersonal conflicts, sexual politics, alien perspectives, and grappling with the implications of technology. I talk with Seth about all these issues, and maybe a little bit about whether it's a good idea to block people on Twitter. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Seth MacFarlane is a screenwriter, director, actor, producer, and singer. He is the creator of the animated TV shows Family Guy, American Dad!, and The Cleveland Show. He wrote, directed, and starred in the films Ted, Ted 2, and A Million Ways to Die in the West. He created and stars in the live-action episodic TV show The Orville (which will be moving from Fox to Hulu for its third season). He has recorded several albums as a jazz singer, and was the host of the Academy Awards in 2013. He is an executive producer for the reboot of Cosmos. His honors include several Primetime Emmy Awards, an Annie Award, a Webby Award, a Saturn Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. IMDB profile Wikipedia Facebook Allmusic profile The Orville: IMDB, Wikipedia, YouTube Twitter

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Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And people who like science, it's very natural, often also enjoy science fiction. We like to think that science fiction is the literature of ideas, right? That science fiction takes us places, puts human beings in situations where ordinary fiction, which is constrained by reality, might not let us go. So there's opportunities within science fiction to ask questions and to examine existing questions in ways that would otherwise not be possible. So today, we have an interesting angle in the science

fiction universe. We're talking to Seth MacFarlane, the actor, director, writer, who is famous for, of course, things like Family Guide, the animated show, movies like Ted and Once Upon a time in the West, and Seth also has albums. He's a singer and arranger of music. But the project that he's working on that I'm most interested for this conversation is the Orville. This is, as you might know, science fiction TV show that appears on Fox, it just completed its second season. Third season will be upcoming. And it's basically Star Trek with some comedic touches. I think in the early days, people were a little confused about what the Orville was supposed to be. It had dramatic elements and comedic elements. And it took about half a season, I would say, in season one to find

its feet, really. But now, to be honest, not just because Seth is on the show, I think this is one of the most interesting TV shows out there. They are really using the medium of science fiction to talk about issues that are very, very relevant to us here on Earth right now. So that's what Seth agree to talk about. And we had a very interesting, thoughtful discussion about how you come up with these scenarios, how they do relate to what's going here on Earth, you know, how the real world cannot help but affect your science fictional drama that you're writing, and hopefully backwards how thinking about these new things in a science fictional setting can give us new handles on the problems we have here on earth. So I think it's a very rewarding conversation. And also,

you know, the first thing that comes up and everyone admits it's true is that Seth has a really wonderful voice for radio or podcasts. So that's always always makes it a pleasant experience. I think you're going to like this one. Let's go. Seth McFarlane, welcome in the Mindscape podcast. Thank you very much. So you seem to be a able to keep busy. He seemed to have a lot going on. I know you have had TV shows and movies, various forms of talking animals and talking stuff to animals, but I really wanted to concentrate on the Orville, this science fiction show, which I've become a big fan of. Why don't we say what the show is for the few of us in the audience who don't know. You know, the show is kind of

a classic style, episodic, sci-fi adventure series that that sort of of adheres to the traditional sci-fi method of storytelling, which is to take elements of our society, you know, whether it be social or political or scientific and find ways to tell stories about those things in an allegorical fashion through the lens of sci-fi. And, you know, for me, I grew up with episodic sci-fi. I grew up with things like the Twilight. Zone and obviously Star Trek and and uh you know I I miss that style of storytelling which I was I could see a self-contained show that was based around an idea as opposed to a twist and I think in the age of oh that's a good way of putting it like what so what well yeah in the

age of streaming shows where you're dealing with a story arc that lasts throughout the season it's kind of hard to to explore a lot of different um areas of, it's hard to tell the diversity of stories becomes less in that format. And it starts to become about how can I surprise the audience with a crazy twist rather than what used to be the case is how, what new idea can I present to the audience this week? And you really can only do that with self-contained stories, I think. Yeah. And certainly I'm a big fan of a lot of the, you know, cable prestige. drama long series, but there's absolutely a place.

But that's all we're getting now. I know, exactly. I miss, you know, procedural and Monsters of the Week and whatever. Yeah, I mean, it's nice to, you know, one of the mission statements of the Orville is that, is that, you know, within reason, you know, we do like to reward our fans for, for sticking with us. But it also should be something where you don't have to commit to an entire season right off the bat if you don't want to. can watch one hour and we'll tell you a story that doesn't require you to have followed every soap opera twist that's come before it. And that's, you know, there's nothing, there's no television show you can watch now where the first episode doesn't insist that you

stick around for the next eight or 13. And it's like, who the hell has that kind of time? Yeah. Does it create pressure on you or the writers to go up with a new plot every week? Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's a different kind of. of, you know, obviously to map out a serialized arc throughout the course of a season is a lot of work. But I do think that at the end of the day, that's, that's a, that's one idea that you're, it's one story that you're telling over the course of eight or ten episodes. To come up with a brand new idea every week, you know, it's, it, I have such renewed respect for guys like Serling who, particularly at a time when there was no, nothing to really, there was

no template to work from. He had to reinvent the wheel that he was able to bring a brand new idea every week. Yeah. And not just for 13, for 22. And the Twilight Zone was obviously one of the inspirations. Even more obviously Star Trek was an inspiration. So let's just tell the audience, you have a spaceship, you're on the bridge, there's aliens. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. The idea of a what is in effect, a naval ship in space. rather than on the waters is something that's been around since, I mean, probably, I probably since before the 1930s, but obviously in film, that seems to be where,

where it emerged in the most memorable way with the serialized films that, that come from that era. You know, Star Trek was the first franchise to really solidify it as a, you know, to kind of work out the kinks. And it's interesting. You watch Star Wars or Buck Rogers are these subsequent shows, and they're all kind of taken cues from the original Star Trek.

I mean, you know, when Star Wars uses the term cloaking device, it's, you know, that's something that they got from Star Trek. Tractor beams. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tractorines. Absolutely, yeah. They just, you know, they wrote.

There's a whole toolbox there. They wrote the book for all of us. And it's really just how you want to use it. And, you know, I think for us, if, if the, Star Trek franchise was doing that particular thing at this point in time, then there might not be a place for the Orville. But because they're not, they've gone more of the streaming serialized direction. It's left this big wide opening that we've been able to step into with our show.

And we've been having a blast. So I take it you were a Star Trek fan growing up. Were you a science fiction fan in general? I was, yeah. Yeah. And I was kind of picky and choosy about the sci-fi that I never really got into Blade Runner. or Battlestar Galactic or these kind of hard sci-fi.

I was a big fan of Star Trek, big fan of the Twilight Zone. You know, I enjoyed some Ray Bradbury. Some of it got a little too heady for me when I was a kid. So it was reading as well as TV movies? Yeah, yeah. I used to, you know, I was a hindline guy myself at that age,

but you know, also as a Marvel and Sturgeon and Zalachene. Sturgeon, it's interesting. I bought a collection. of his short stories and they're really out there. They're, and it's interesting, there's a lot of comedy in his writing. It's a lot of mixing sci-fi and comedy.

And some of them are, some of them are very much of their time, but others are, you know, have these little snippets of wisdom that are applicable to ours. Did you, how long have you been thinking about doing a sci-fi show? You know,

I, for some time, This show was This show emerged Originally the Orville was going to be a I'd written it as sort of a feature idea And then very quickly decided No this is there's nothing like this on TV right now

It was the initial version of it was very Comedy heavy And when I look back at it I realize that that wasn't really the show that I wanted to do That since we we've kind of veered, we've taken that pressure off ourselves and veered more towards into, veered more towards traditional science fiction without the pressure of having to have that comedy frosting on it to such a degree, I've been having a lot more fun. I've realized this is,

I mean, even more so than writing family guy, it just comes, it just comes flowing out. It's, it's easier. So maybe I never should have been a comedy writer in the first place. We discover ourselves. We're young. We're not done yet. Yeah. But it's, I mean, it's, it's a blast. It's, it's, and it's gratifying to see that people were, fans were willing to, willing and ready and in many cases, eager to see that from us.

I think a lot of it initially was fear that no one would take me seriously if I wrote a sci-fi show. And it's, I've been pleasantly disproven. Well, I thought it was very interesting the initial reaction to the show. Not just what it was, but from whom? I'm getting it correctly. Like, if you go on to the professional critics season one reviews, they were not good. But the audience loved it. And season two, it's caught up, right?

And part of that was it the evolution of the show, or do we have to educate them? I think some of it was the evolution of the show. I think the minority of the smaller portion was the evolution of the show. I don't think the show changed that much because we did one of the episodes we did show the critics initially was the about a girl episode about Bortis's baby. That's a big one. And that gets pretty, you know, for season one, that gets pretty, pretty dark. Intense, yeah. And they were, I think what happened was it took them a minute to realize that we weren't trying.

to do the serialized format that everyone else is doing and that we were, you know, the whole point was to let the story dictate the tone. And I mean, look at the original Star Trek, you see a lot of that. There's, there are episodes that are very dark, very dramatic. There are episodes that feel more like a comedy. There's trouble with triples, right? Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I see it as, I mean, look,

life is that way. You have one day where it's your birthday and you fall in the swimming pool by accident, and another day where you lose a family member. And those days have very different tones. And it's all the same life, but it feels very different. And there's television, you know, television can reflect that. And the characters have to be consistent. And they have to be your anchor.

But beyond that, I think there's no reason that the story can't dictate what the tone is if you're telling an episodic story that's self-contained. And I think that's what through the critics, I think with three episodes, they felt like this thing was disjointed. And look, I mean, I, for whatever reason, you know, when I, they always come out swinging when I do something new anyway. Yeah. There's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of the reviews being written before the thing came out. But, but I was, I was, I don't know, you know, You try to ignore it, but at the same time, it's gratifying when you see that nice, big, fat, round tomato on that 100%. That's right.

That does feel good. I don't hate it. You do read the comments, in other words. I have my little podcast, and I try not to, but it's a social thing that we're doing. Yeah, it's, for television, it's, and I imagine, yeah, for a podcast as well, I imagine, like you're doing something for an audience. So there is a partnership between you and the audience. You know, with, I mean, a lot of what you do, though, is science-based, right? On the podcast, not quite 50%, less than 50%, but.

Because that's where it gets dicey is that you, you know, this idea that, you know, can't we all just have different opinions? Well, you can on this, but not really on that. You know, with entertainment with something like the Orville, it's very, you know, I'm very curious. I read as much as I can. I mean, I read, it's sometimes, it's totally. torture, but you know, I'll read Reddit, I'll read YouTube comments, I'll read Twitter, I'll read Instagram, you know, I'll just get as much information as I can't. Just, just, A, because

it's, it's fun to see people talking about it. And sci-fi fans are so passionate about, you know, about what they like and what they don't like. And it's, you try to balance it between your own vision of where you want the show to go and what it is they want to see because, and I think if you can thread that needle, you're doing something right. I think you can't let them guide you completely, but at the same time you can't ignore it. But you can learn something.

Like they're not a deal with them, right? No, no, it's, it's really, I mean, it's, it's interesting. The Isaac two-parter that we did our second season was something that was a big question mark for us. It was dark, and it was big, and it was pure sci-fi,

and I had no idea whether people were going to, whether people were going to, respond to that or not. And not only they respond to it, it was the most popular set of episodes to date for the series. And the rest of that season kind of put the Isaac story on hold because we had written them all

in advance and I didn't realize it was going to be that successful. But I, you know, reading as much of what I did online, I discovered, oh, people want to know what the aftermath of this is. And so we, you know, I came back. I hear them. And we're dealing with that in season three. And probably when the show first came out, there were expectations, right?

Like you're a comedy writer. Yeah. I think some of the marketing made it look more like Galaxy Quest or a parody show, right? And then people were a little... It's a lot of fear. It was a lot of fear on both sides. And I think the second season marketing piece that Fox did was terrific. Like, I really thought they did a great job.

The first season, you know, from their end and from my end, there was some fear. You know, it's, it's, and I look, I credit John Favreau for, for being my conscience when he directed the pilot. And he, he pointed out to me on a number of occasions, you know, you have this joke here. And I feel like you're, you're disrupting what is a really good scene. Like he said, you should trust that what you have here, I'm into it. I read this script and, and I didn't put it down. Like, I wanted to know what happened. I was in it.

I like, the story, the story works. And you don't need the crux. of all these jokes. And that was from, you know, I respect him enormously. And so to hear that was kind of the first step toward me making the realization that, all right, maybe, maybe I can do this show that I really wanted to. And, and I don't have to pack it with pies in the face and people will still watch. And yeah, I think it is, it seems to evolve to a place where, uh, it, it's different than a typical sci-fi serialized or, or even episodic show because of the jokes. But it's still, story and character and setting based.

Yeah. And the jokes, the jokes tell you where they want to appear. I mean, you know, the two-parter with Isaac was virtually, I mean, there's a couple jokes in there, but that's about it. And it was, you know, where they show up these days is, you know, just comes more from the casualization of life on board a spaceship rather than hard jokes. It's just the behavior of the characters. It's a little more realistic in some sense, right? People are not quite as stiff as you might see in the TV shows. And it has to be for, it's a tricky line to walk because you want people to care about what happens.

You want to be able to tell a story with big stakes like we did in identity. And oftentimes that means giving up the shtick. I mean, it's like if this is serious, your characters have to treat it seriously. And you just got to embrace that. And so it was nice that the audience went along with us there. And there's also another slightly different thing that we don't have installed. Star Trek is, you know, your ex-wife is your second in command. And there's a lot more of the personalize of the characters, a lot more socializing.

Yeah. Well, that's the part of science fiction that I don't see enough of. I loved, you know, it's no secret. I loved the next generation for their, among other things, for their production design. It was like it always made sense to me that if you were in space for that amount of time, you would have to live somewhere that was comfortable. They had a bar. That was a huge upgrade over the original Star Trek.

It was like the sci-fi version of like the apartment on Friends. You wanted to be there every week. You wanted to go back. And that's something that is that is absolutely absent from science fiction today. All across the board, everything is grim and dark and it looks like you're on a submarine. And it's cool to look at. But it's just doesn't, it's not a place. that you want to live in.

Yeah, it seems a little bit less human. I know what you mean. Yeah. And again, there's a place for it, but there's also a place for this slightly lighter. Yeah, I just, I think, I think you should be able to, on a good sci-fi show, you should be able to accommodate all of it. You know, there's, there's, there's, there's, your characters should be strong enough that even if there's no sci-fi plot, you should be able to tell a dramatic story that week that just

cover that just deals with their lives so when you started planning out the show i presumably you had the idea there would be a starship there would be a crew some of them would be aliens like how much was it fun or kind of torture to sit down and go all right what are the alien races how are they different um a little a little bit that's it's because there's so much science fiction now it's hard to find low hanging fruit has been picked yeah yeah it's hard to find things that haven't been that haven't been dealt with. As you go and as you start to break your stories for the series,

what's nice about it is those races kind of pop up in the midst of, I mean, look, it's for both the Simpsons and Family Guy, it happened with our characters. You know, I remember asking, God, was it, Greg Daniels used to run King of the Hill, I think wrote on The Simpsons, like, where did all these characters come from?

this populace of characters in Springfield. And he said, you know, they just kind of popped up as we went along. Like, a character would emerge in the middle of a story. Like, oh, that's good. Yeah, it'd be a funny character. So let's make that person a part of the town. And eventually the same thing happened with Family Guy. These characters popped up as we were telling these stories.

And, you know, with the Orville, it's been the same. We will tell a story and an alien race will. emerge as part of the narrative, and it works, and so we keep them around. Let's pause for a minute to talk about the Great Courses Plus. I'm really happy that for the very first advertisements we have here on Mindscape, I get to talk about a product I truly believe in. The Great Courses provide accessible, college-level video and audio courses in a wide variety of subjects, from physics to history, to music, and much more. I've done three different courses with them myself, and I can vouch for the fact that there is a rigorous selection process.

It's not just that anyone can go and be a professor for the great courses. You have to audition and you can fail the audition. So you're guaranteed when you get these courses to get teachers who love teaching and who are experts in what they're talking about. And the Great Courses Plus is a streaming service. So you can watch or listen wherever you want at your convenience, either from your own computer or with the Great Courses Plus app on your mobile device. Let me also mention my own course, The Mysteries of Modern Physics, Time. That's 24, half hour, lectures about all the different aspects of time, from physics to philosophy, cosmology, even the psychology and neuroscience of time. And for Mindscape listeners, they have a special offer. If you go to this URL, you can get an entire month for free. So you can start your free month right now by going to the greatcoursesplus.com slash mindscape. That's the greatcoursesplus.com slash mindscape, happy learning. So there are, it seems extremely explicit, at least to me, that you are taking advantage of the idea that science fiction can comment on our current state, you know, our current

problems in various ways. You want to mention some of your favorite. I have a long list here of different things you've done, but. Yeah, that's a broad question. I mean, on other series or as far as what we've done? No, on the or what I'm thinking of is, you know, the obvious example is, board us when he basically develops a porn addiction. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. On what is the equivalent to the holodeck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like that was not an alien worry. That's a very human worry.

No. It's, it's, yeah. I think that's, I think that episode is the only time we ever got a standards note in the history of the show. By the way, is it's, that's pretty good.

It's for me to have that experience. It's like, oh, that's right. There's a broadcast standards department. I mean, we never hear from them. I mean, it's ironic that I have one show that's been virtually condemned by the parents' television counsel and another that's been roundly endorsed. I'm not sure how many people can stay out of their career.

But yeah, you know, that was an episode that, yeah, I mean, just, you know, it dealt with the psychology of, you know, look, I mean, in the age of the internet, when you're walking around with a little, you know, device in your pocket that can access, you know, naked pictures 24 hours a day. And I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's going to affect relationships. That's, that's going to really fuck with people's heads. And, and it's, it's, it's, it's, there, there has to be some kind of fallout for that. And it's, that, that may be a little bit, I, I probably sound like a, uh, a conservative with that, that. Well, that was pretty mella.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there has to be. There are issues. Yeah. It doesn't mean ban it, right? It doesn't mean don't let it happen, but we should face up to the changing reality. Yeah.

I mean, you just have to be aware of, of how, of what your relationship is with technology. I mean, Twitter is the best example. We're all on Twitter. I mean, I fucking hate it. I don't know about you. You do. I do. I do.

Yeah. I mean, I block people a lot. Yeah. And that's what makes a tolerable. But isn't that a tricky thing because it's, it's, I used to do that. I still do it from time to time just because I don't want to deal with it. But it's almost like people take it as a tacit acknowledgment. Yeah, no.

They wear it as a badge of honor. And it's like, well, you don't really want to give them that. You know, let them have their victories. I thought that for a long time. I muted people who I didn't like. And what convinced me was friends who said, if you mute somebody, then the rest of the people reading the comments on your tweets still hear them. All right. You miss them.

Whereas if you block them, then they just can't interact. And Twitter is a weird thing because you're broadcasting to everybody. Do you think there's any positive at this point? I think initially obviously Twitter was this charming little platform that was new and fun. We would each write a joke every day. It's funny, yeah. Do you think there's any upside to Twitter at this point in town? I invited you with this podcast over Twitter.

Okay, well, beyond that. No, I've made good friends over Twitter. Like, I have, I've met people who I otherwise wouldn't have met, people who become friends in real life. I learn about things. I can follow people. I was just joking with this or talking with a friend of mine last night about this. I tried really hard to follow a bunch of conservatives on Twitter. And I found that the only ones who I could really, like, follow without degrading my state of mind were ones who hated Donald Trump.

Yeah. So there are those, you know, principal conservatives. but then there's a whole swamp out there, crazy people who try hard to avoid. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is tricky because I have, you know, I have a lot of liberal friends. Obviously, I live in Hollywood. I do have a fair number of conservative friends. And, you know, yeah, there is a difference between your conservative friend who votes for Mitt Romney

and your conservative friend who votes for Donald Trump. Like that, those are two different types of people. Maybe there's more crossover than we'd like to think. and I try to not let that keep me up at night. Well, I think, you know, Twitter and Facebook and all these things, we're just in the beginning, right? There's a technology that is changing everything. I do believe that we're going to have implants in our heads before too long that will let us do this without the intermediary of the phone. And there's lots of science fiction stories here about this.

There is a fear that I'm actually somebody who does not subscribe to the fear that I think this, as much as I grouse about Twitter and, And these are the early forms of this technology. I do think there's a lot of, at the moment, destructive power that they seem to have much more so than constructive. But you talk about implants in your head. I mean, you look at something like evolution, which is real. Let's just establish that. It's an official mindset position that evolution is real. But it's just this staggering, you know, brainless moronic thing that makes its way through.

through the millennia, having no, and stumbles on us by accident. Like at a certain point, you do kind of think to yourself, boy, we could do a better job. And there's a dystopian, there's a dystopian onus that goes along with that. Yes. And I don't, and I think that it's time to kind of maybe revisit that idea. Because if you could, I mean, God of me, if you could just tweak some things in the human body that, that, that, that, that, that, uh, You know, my God, look at eating. Yeah.

It's like your body. Evolution still thinks that I'm out there with a spear in my hand trying to hunt a bore. Yeah. It doesn't realize it. No, there's like a McDonald's right there. Well, I think that that's the thing because we focus a lot on AI and computers, but I think that the making human beings more automated and changing them, editing them.

I've talked on the podcast with synthetic biologists who are building cells from scratch, you know? And, yeah, that's why I say we're just at the beginning of what these changes are going to take. And you think about really, how different is that from using a drug to save your life if you have, you know, if you have an infection? In some sense, it's not, right? But then, so the thought experiment is, well, what if I invented drug that just makes you happy all the time, but you never leave your chair.

Is that an improvement in your life or not? I think it's called Jack Daniels. You have to leave some. Yeah, no, that's that and that's, yeah, that is a, that's a concern. Yeah, brave new world. We're going to be seeing some. And I, and I'm a huge believer. that science fiction helps us just go a little bit toward thinking these things through ahead of time.

Yeah, that's a big job then. So, Bordas, for those who have not seen the show, Bortis and Clyden are members of this race, the Mocklin. And we're told there are only men, only male Mocklins. But they managed to give birth somehow, which makes me think that they're really only female Mocklands. So I'm not quite sure of the definition of male or female is. I think we've, you know, we've, we've, we've struggled that a little bit. The, the, the, the storytelling value that that species gives you as opposed to the logic of the biology. What we've kind of landed on is, all right, their definitions are a little different than what ours are.

They're very masculine presenting, right? They're pretty macho. Because, you know, it is, at the end of the day, you can always fall back on me. Well, they're aliens. It's different. That's right. But, but, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's a, it's an interesting. it was a dynamic that I hadn't seen before.

These two very stoic, you know, kind of classically science fiction aliens who were, you know, who were a pair, who were mates. Yeah. And had this kind of domestic life going on. And it's, I mean, those two actors are just gold. I mean, Chad Coleman, who I think also does the expanse. Oh, yeah, he was cutty on the wire. Yeah. And Peter Macon, obviously, is bored us, are, they're, I mean, they're my favorite couple on TV.

I can endorse that. You could do a lot worse. But then, so I'm going to mention in the introduction that we're spoiling everything, so that's okay. But they have a child. It is female. This is a scandal. And the cultural expectation is that there will be a sex change to turn it into a boy. Yeah.

And, I mean, that is heavy stuff to be tackling right. there in season one. Yeah. Well, it's what, what always fascinating to me was, and again, the specifics of that episode and that conflict are, are arguably less pertinent than the, um, than the more general conflict that's, that's a play in there. And that's, if you have another culture that does things their own way, that doesn't, doesn't stack up with your morals and your code of ethics, but it's still their culture. At, point do you, at what point do you respect their ways and at what point does that get so insane that you can't justify it in your own mind or, or, uh, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or,

or, or, or, or, or, it becomes time to be galaxy police. And Claire, I guess, is the doctor. Yeah. Yeah. So, her question was she is also one of the treasures of the show. Oh, She's great. That actress is amazing. She wanted to know, you know, was it, she worked through the ethical dilemma here, you know, who is benefiting from this? Is it medically necessary or is this just a cultural thing? And I don't think there's obvious answers to these questions. Those are my favorite kinds of stories.

Like I, and look, as much as I love, as much as I think there is a, there is an absence in television of noble people who just want to do the right thing. Everyone's an anti-hero. And I do miss the simplicity of, you know, Gary Cooper saying, damn it, I just got married, but I got to turn around and go fight this bad guy. I do think that that's not a good thing that that doesn't exist on television. That I, you know, when I was a kid, I had, you know, it was fiction, but there were people like, you know, was Picard and it was, you know, people who were people who were people who were, uh, were just out to do the, you know, even the superheroes.

Super friends, for God's sake. They were so wholesome. But these were people who were just out to do the right thing. And I think at the end of the day, to see people struggling with what the right thing is, but yet coming from a noble place and coming from a virtuous place, but not being able to find a clear answer, those to me are the most interesting kind of stories that I can latch on to. I get a little weary of, oh, this guy's a murderer and a drug addict and all this, and I'm supposed to sympathize with them.

It's at a certain point. It's just, I'm just watching terrible people do terrible things. It does worry down a little bit. You know, it's, it's, I love the Handmaid's tale, but at a certain point, I start to get tired of this girl getting kicked around. I read the book. I couldn't bring myself to watch. Have you seen Flea Bag? I haven't seen Flea bag.

It's really, really good, but in the beginning, it's just hard because they're just, uh, so many bad things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is, it is, I mean, that's the most fun stuff to write is those stories that don't have a clear cut. And that's what we're always looking for on the Orville. Those stories that don't have a clear cut what's right and what's wrong. And, you know, things that, you know, where you have to weigh the rights of the individual against the needs of the society. It's all interesting stuff. And it's all stuff that science fiction is, is arguably.

more equipped than any genre to address. And I have a blast right in those kinds of stories. This June, the world comes to Los Angeles. Kick off FIFA World Cup 2026 at the FIFA Fan Festival of the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Watch matches live on giant

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We had the thought while watching some superhero movie that like every superhero movie is a trolley problem. Basically, it's like the choice between, you know, being nice to my friend, who I know, or saving the universe. And of course, because it's a superhero movie, they usually figure out how to do both. But these are, these are the real dilemmas and that can play out an infinite number of different ways. Yeah, it's, it's fun to leave that stuff. I mean, look, there are certain stories where you it is clear. Like this is right and this is wrong.

You may disagree with me, but I'm pretty confident in my ethics. I find that a lot of what we do on the Orville is we struggle along with the characters. It's a tough thing to, you know, I mean, that story is a good example. This is their society.

But what they're doing is, really fucked up. And I mean, look, I mean, it's, it's, it's Saudi Arabia is like a perfect example. It's, it's their culture, but, you know, look how they treat women. Yeah, I mean, I'm not personally, when do you walk in there and say, hey, you're going to stop doing this and you're going to start doing things this way. Um, you know, people have differing opinions. I, I happen to believe that in, in that scenario, uh, there is an argument to be made for, being a little bit of a hero and helping out the oppressed. But not everyone agrees with that.

Some people would say it's their culture. It's not your business. Yeah, I'm on your side in the sense. I do think sometimes you're going to try to intervene. But I certainly historically recognize that there's plenty of times when societies have talked themselves into the idea that they were the virtuous ones. And in fact, they were just imposing their own views, right? We've had crusades.

colories and the whole bit. Did you get pushback from that episode by people who have interests one way or the other in gender reassignment or gender identity? We didn't. No, certainly not from the company. I mean, what's interesting about Foxes is for all of their

conservatism on the news side, I've never once been censored in any way when anything that I've done. I will say that for them. And, you know, when the episode aired, there was, there were, there were mixed reactions. And there was a lot of passionate things written about the story. And, you know, again, there were some things that I read that educated me a little bit and some things that I thought were, were a little bit, maybe not so correct in their analysis of the show. But it's, you know, overall the reaction that I found to that show and it was gratifying was that, hey, at least somebody's talking about this on a network.

Yeah. Yeah. And you'll reach a different set of audiences than the ones who are very passionate on Twitter about those things, right? Well, sexuality is definitely going to be an area where science fiction can talk about things that are a little out there. And you've done it, right? You've had your human characters have sex with, with asteroids or with robots. with gelatinous blobs. And, you know, some of that was very brave.

Like the scene where Claire was having sex with a gelatinous blob, that's ever going to leave my brain. Yeah, that was, yeah, I mean, again, God bless Penny, man. She's like, she's game for whatever you throw at her. And I think that it makes the audience think about, like, if I do find this icky, why do I find this icky? Is that something you're intentionally going for? Yeah, I mean, it's a. There's no right way to answer that. I mean, it's, you know, do I find this icky?

Would I want to have sex with a gelatinous blob? Probably not. And that's okay. A gelatinous blob played by Norm McDonald. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, it's, it leaves the door open for interpretation in a lot of cases. But in contrast, when she fell in love with Isaac, the robot, it was not played for laughs in any way, right? It's actually very tender.

Yeah, well, I mean, this, you know, the idea of the artificial intelligence that's, that's trying to understand and trying to communicate. I mean, that's always, it's a classic. It's a classic because it's convert, it's both warm and fuzzy and funny. There's a lot of different colors that that you can play with, with a character like that. Like those, the non-human characters trying to grasp, um, human culture is always, you know, always a great, I mean, it's always a rich source of sci-fi writing. But yeah, I mean, I, you know, to me, I don't know, I thought, why not? I mean, if at a certain point, it's reasonable to assume that an artificial intelligence is going to reach the point where it achieves consciousness, I would think. Maybe it's happened already, I don't know. But presumably at some point, that's, that's not a crazy thing to think will happen. And so, what, you know, is that off limits? Like, I mean, he's, he's a person.

Well, we're, we're getting there. I mean, there's, you know, the sex robots are definitely coming. And then the sex robots will be easier than love interest robots. Yeah. But they're going to happen. Sure. And then, of course, the question of rights. I mean, you know, it's like you can't really have a sex robot that's sentient.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would not be, that would not be moral. Yeah. But it's, it's, yeah, that, that story was interesting because it's, it's, it's, it's, I don't know. In that, I just wanted to tell sort of a classic Hollywood love story that ended with singing in the rain. And, you know, these two very, very different people who, you know, what's the version of emotion from somebody who can't feel? And the best example of that that I can think of was Alan J. Lerner's solution to Pygmalion when he was writing the lyrics for My Fair Lady is that song.

I've grown accustomed to her face. It's like that was his solution to a love song that's not a love song because Henry Higgins was not an emotional character. I mean, not in that way. He was very, you know, a lot of histrionics, but he wasn't, he was very cold and unfeeling. And so it made no sense for this guy to sing a love song.

So what he lashed on to is that he had just become used to her presence. And that was, I took a little bit of that and applied it to Isaac. in trying to determine what it is about him that would fit with his machine mentality, but would still acknowledge her absence from his life. We can't really help but tell these stories from a human-centric point of view. It's very hard to, it's very hard to, you know, because your audience is human. Yeah, they are, mostly human.

And they're mostly human. And therefore, there will always be this hint or this implication that, the emotionless robot can learn something from us. And maybe there has been enough of us learning something from that. I completely agree. It's funny, when I used to watch the original Star Trek, I used to have that thought about Spock. There was always this nagging thing in my head that would scream. This guy kind of has it figured out.

It seems like once every seven years he goes crazy, but okay. This society is a lot more peaceful than what we have going on. He developed science and everything, yeah. But no, I think absolutely that's true. I think that's, look, in a perfect world where the Terminator doesn't come true, you do reach a point where, you know, in the distant or not so distant future, if artificial intelligence is an element that's a day-to-day part of our lives that we do learn from each other. So you also talked about religion on the show, right? You have the krill who are highly religious, basically religious fanatic. right

do you but it didn't seem like it was an element of the show but it wasn't like an in-depth investigation of the pros and cons yeah and in the third season we're we're expanding we're we're broadening that culture a little bit so it's not just that one note it's it's um yeah i don't want to give anything away but it's it is um it's it's an element that that it's whenever i write the krill i have like there's always a different idea of who they are in in in in my head, you know, are the krill? Are they, are they terrorists? Are they us? Are they, there's always, there's always, I can never really figure out where it is they, they land. And, you know, they're always

sort of a metaphor for something. Well, other than robots, uh, it seems implausible that entire race of creatures would be evil. Yes, I agree. Right. So they're going to have good aspects. And that's, and that's where, that's where telea is, I mean, Talaa is one of my favorite characters. that Michaela McManus came in to do a guest spot in this one episode and she was so amazing that we just ended up

deciding this is going to be a character that we're going to see over and over. She was the Mocklin. Am I remembering correctly? She was the krill woman who Gordon the teacher. Yeah.

And in the second season we brought her back and again that's another one of my favorite go-to sci-fi stories is the enemy mine idea where, you know, you look for that commonality in the enemy, and it's always there. It's always there. Almost always, right? Probably Hitler didn't have it.

But for the most part. Hitler had a mother. There is, you know, there's a commonality. There's, I mean, that's the extreme version. I do think that there's a you know, when you sit down with

conservatives, even hardcore conservatives, you do find that you have a lot more in common than you thought. I mean, nobody's going into it wanting to be the bad guy.

Everyone wants to believe that they're doing the right thing. And, and, you know, that idea of, you know, no matter how,

as you say, like, no matter how bad the race is, it's kind of irresistible that eventually you meet one that is, that turns out to be, you know, somebody that you can relate to. Surprise you in some way. Yeah. Well, and going back to Twitter, I mean, one of the things about our current moment is we can demonize whole groups of other people because we hear about them all the time without interacting with them, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so we can hold this cartoon of them in our brain. Yeah, yeah. And look, I think that happens. I think that's happening with, look, Fox News made all. whole career of that. I mean, that Fox News made a whole brand of that rather. There was this article recently, like how Fox News destroyed my family. Do you see that one?

I didn't see that, no. It's basically, you know, when I used to go home and my parents or whatever would have slightly reactionary opinions, but we could talk, but now they think that all my friends are the devil. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's too oversimplified. I mean, look, Fox News, there's, there's no getting around that that network is, is, it's, it's one of the, the, instigators. Some would say the biggest instigator of that kind of thinking. I mean, when they, you know,

when I all started the network, it was about storytelling. It was creating heroes and villains. He's the good guys and these are the bad guys. People want to see, they want that simplistic narrative. They were talented at telling those stories.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And they still are. And it's, and it's, I mean, as destructive as it is, you can see the formula. It's about, it's about us and them. And, you know, I never saw that from the other side until the emergence of social media. Yeah. And I mean, my God, you know, you make a mild observation and conservatives, liberals, I mean, they'll all come after you. So am I mistaken or is there, I haven't seen any social media on the Orville. Has that gotten rid of in the future?

It's, oh, oh, on the show. I was going to say, our marketing people really are doing their job then out. The other way around, I've seen the Orville on social media, not social media on the Orville. Yeah, you know, it's something that we felt was better addressed as something that is elsewhere. The social media episode in season one was, I think, a much more effective use of, of, of, it's, it's, it's, hard. There's certain things that are cultural things are really hard to depict in science

fiction without looking silly. Or looking dated five years later. Yeah, I mean, technology is easy. You know, the uniforms are easy. The ships are easy. But when you get into, like, people ask me all the time, how come they never listen, how come the music that they listen to, how can the pop culture is always of our time? And I I always have to say,

have you ever heard future music in sci-fi that doesn't sound so fucking stupid. There's no way. You can't predict it. If I could predict that, I'd be a billionaire in the music industry. So why not get a joke out of it, right?

Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it's, it's just, it's just a sensible, you know,

those are things that, that are not, we're not there to do that job. That's for the futurists. And I, so I also like, Beyond big themes like social media, religion or whatever, you've had some interesting episodes just about personal anxiety, imposter syndrome, roughly speaking. John, I guess it was.

We learn at some point he's actually super smart genius IQ, but has been hiding it in a way that many people can probably relate to. And is that, again, where does that come from? Is that personal experience on the writers? or is there a mission to sort of tackle questions like that? That was sort of a, it was a little simpler than that. I mean, yeah, look, imposter syndrome is, I think a lot of people in Hollywood feel it. That's this idea that you're a fraud and you're not really making anything great. We have that in academia too.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I tend to look back at things that I've written, earth even things that I'm in the process of writing and beat myself up and, you know, somehow convince myself that I'm just, I should get out of the business and do something completely different. But that was, that was more of a result of the need to give that character something more to do. I mean, it's, you have a helmsman and a navigator side by side and we'd made this whole deal about Gordon being the best pilot in the fleet. And there's John sitting There's nothing compensating.

Two of them are great together. But beyond that, we wanted him to have his own identity. There was a little bit of a sacrifice because they're so good together that you no longer have them sitting next to each other and you lose a little bit of that. But what we gain was, you know, an identity for this character that really ended up, A, giving us a story and B, being the anchor for this kind of rogues gallery and engineering that, you know, this. It's a wild world down there in the engine room. And he's, you know, he's kind of the Steve Martin, Roxanne character who's got to kind of corral the fire department. Well, I think it's very interesting for, you know, as an audience member, probably we attribute much too much intentionality and planning to everything that happens in the story, in the episodes. But in fact, sometimes, like, there's a problem and you have to fix it and that leads to new story options, right?

Yeah, it's interesting reading. there's times when they've they've they predict things well and they figure it out and they're right that we have thought this out I mean you know the Isaac Isaac turning on the crew was something that was in our minds from day one so that was that was all part of the plan but you know there are other things that I will read and I'll react in such a way I'll say to myself this this is they they think they're way smarter than we are is there way overthought either a danger or an opportunity to get ideas by reading other people's tweets? Yeah, I think, I think that's, I mean, you, you, you never want to be in a position where you're,

you're stealing something from somebody, but if, but if somebody says something about the show, like, hey, boy, I'd love to see this or I'd love to, you know, that, that's all fair game. That's all fair. That's just, that's just responding to your fans. And, and, yeah, I mean, that's, that's hearing what the audience wants. So I do, I do pay attention to that stuff. You've definitely been, it's a science fiction show, but you're also a science fan, right, for its own sake. I think that the first time I saw you in person was at the Science and Entertainment Exchange launch event.

My wife, Jennifer, was the director of the Science Entertainment Exchange. She was the first director. And that's an organization that does a great amount of good here and down. Absolutely. So how much do you care about the science of your science fictional universe? It's important. Well, look, I have to. knowledge that the whole reason the science and entertainment exchange was created to to my knowledge is

is that so many people get their science from fiction they get their science they get their medical science from their law from ER and gray's anatomy and they they get their law from you know CSI or whatever law and order but so I think there is a responsibility to to be right I mean you know Andre is Andre Bermanes for years, Andre Bermannis been doing this for years. If there's something that I'm hazy on, you know, I'll pick up the phone and call,

you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson or, or, you know, I mean, in many cases, it, I'd walk across the hall to Annie Drewian's office

who works on Cosmos and not technically a scientist, but my God, she, sure talks like one. And, and, you know, you do try to do your,

I mean, my God, I was in a, I was in a session with my psychiatrist, Kristen, and I stopped, stopped in the middle to take some notes about a story that, like, let me ask it this. If an alien did this and he came in here and he sat down on this couch, how would you react? And, you know, so, or if I'm at a, you know, I go from my annual physical and I have a medical

question that relates to a story we're telling, I do try to get it from the right sources. You, you can, you know, time will only allow so much of that, but you do try to. try to be responsible. If it's something that's a story that's just too damn good that requires us to stretch it a little bit, then we will. But where it's feasible, we do try to be scientifically responsible, yeah. I'm a big believer that the science serves the story in a fictional, you know, fictional environment. The science should be of the form that it makes you not go, oh, that wouldn't happen. Well, it can't ever feel like magic. And there's one area that, you know, Brandon Bragg and I have talked about this, is one area that we both struggle with

when we're writing aliens is that the idea of a, you know, the super strength from a planet with high gravity, like, you know, that, that I can get on board with that. The one that I always struggle with is telepaths. That's the one that always, I can never wrap my brain around

how that doesn't feel like magic. Right. How it doesn't feel like basically, you're basically writing a psychic. If you employ technology into the mix, then I start to kind of see it. But you don't even have a teleporter machine, a transporter machine. We don't.

Was that a conscious decision? It was a conscious decision for two reasons. One, one, that it's obviously so emblematic of Star Trek. But two, if you study the science of it, I mean, you know this. I do. But go ahead. You're killing yourself. Basically.

You're not the same person. If you're not the same person, you're committing suicide and being reformed as a copy. And that bothers you? It just seems like just dystopian enough. that it didn't need to be. The shuttles do just fine. Yeah, you can shuttle people around. It's actually,

it can get a little bit more dramatic thing. You get cool shots. The orchestra gets to chime. I mean, you know, obviously in the 60s, they did that because it saved money. Yeah, right.

But now you can show the ships leaving, I mean, those shots of the shuttle leave in the bay. It's, it's nice. And it's like it makes the world seem real. And this is a, you know,

this is a big deal when we launch one of these things. We're going down to a planet. And isn't that fun? I do have to ask, though, about time travel, right? We've introduced time travel, last few episodes of season two. As soon as you allow yourself time travel, there's a million choices you need to make, storytelling-wise. So were there a lot of arguments or discussions in the room about that? It's, we recognize we're opening a can of worms.

It's surprising how many fans of sci-fi do have an aversion to time travel. They just really don't want you going there. It's a dangerous mixture. It's a dangerous mixture. It's always, to me, it's always fun. I'm a big fan of time travel stories. I'm a big fan. I loved that 1122.62.63 that Stephen King.

Oh, I never saw it. I was, loved it. You know, I mean, you need only look as far as back to the future to recognize the narrative value that time travel serves in fiction. You just have to be careful. You just have to be careful of, I mean, it's a lot to think about. And I think we filled all the holes in that story, but I'm not sure. Well, did you see Avengers Endgame? I haven't.

So there's a line in there where Paul is. I have to find six hours out of my life. Yeah, that's true. Where he says, wait, because there's time travel in there. And he goes, wait, you mean back to the future was just bullshit? And I think that might be partly my fault. I was an advisor on endgame and I explained in detail why Back to the Future was bullshit to the writers. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot.

I mean, although the paradoxes in Back to the Future are undeniable. Well, there's paradoxes. I get that. What really I cannot stand in Back to the Future. You know, it's a brilliant movie. Like, as a cinema, it's fine, wonderful. But, you know, Michael J. Fox does something in the past. And then in real time, we see photographs changing in the present.

How does it know? Did you ever see frequency? A Dennis Quaid movie where he cuts off the guy's hand in the past and then in the future the guy watches his hand disappeared. Oh, I didn't see that. Looper has the same thing. Yeah, it's a very similar thing. Yeah, it's more than a little silly. But I think narratively, yeah, as far as I could tell, you're consistent.

It's really hard to tell stories, though, with that. I mean, it was another sort of Star Trek that did it very well called Yesterday's Enterprise. It was a, everything changed instantly. And, and that was, you were. were just in the new timeline and that was it. Science-wise, it's all actually bullshit, though. Is it? Yeah.

That's not what would happen. Even if time travel were possible, that's not what would happen. What would happen? The most sensible way to have time travel is you can travel fast, but you cannot change it. But, oh, that's interesting. So that's, I mean, that's sort of what Stephen King used in his book. But so certain elements of the universe presumably seeming as if they are, the laws of physics would forbid it. That's right.

In some fashion. Like, the tree would fall. before you so you so you that's really it is yeah I think that there's I've actually made small efforts to make this happen I think there's a wonderful TV show to be made about a time traveling detective yeah who can go back and learn things about the past but not change it and it sometimes you know there's a murder or whatever you would really really want to change it but literally you know you can't and therefore if you tried so how but how would that manifest itself well you don't know ahead of time all you know is that you will fail right so if you try the change to pass there's

danger that you'll get killed or something like that because you know it won't succeed because it didn't happen that way. But does that make the universe seem almost like a conscious entity that's out to stop you? It just means that there are laws of physics that we're all obeying, right? And so what I try to pitch this, people are like, well, it's not interesting if you can't change the past. I'm like, well, CSI is interesting. Like detective shows are interesting.

They can't change the past. You just learn things about it. And if you were there, you would learn it in a much more dramatic way. So, okay. But even just by visiting the past, aren't you changing the past? If we're really talking about the butterfly effect. You were always there. You were always there.

That's the point. And they put it well and lost. Whatever happened happened, right? If you went there, I mean, Heinlein tells the story where a character is his own mother and father. Right. But everything's completely consistent. That's an interesting story that we were playing with something like that. last season and that's always interesting story but that's a hard one to crack oh yeah the logic of that

is always like you got to work your brain into pretzels but okay but even that I don't know how entertaining it is to watch yeah the standard thing to do is have multiple timelines right that's what we talk about and even maybe in quantum mechanics that's actually plausible who no one really knows but we do it anyway but then here's the the I have a not a science issue with that but a moral issue with it like when you have as we have had at the end of season two a separate timeline and things are bad. Yeah. Okay.

So you send someone back to fix it. Now you're back on the good time. Yeah. Does that mean you just killed billions of people in the other timeline? Yeah. And they're their lives. Probably. Yeah.

Is that you're the world's greatest monster? Yep. Yep. I mean, it's, it's that cold calculating the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. You made a better universe, but there's a whole universe that you got rid of. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, that's, that's a very good point.

I think I think that's where you're faced with a choice and neither one is, I mean, look, those are the, again, those are the best kinds of stories. It's like the choice where neither one is really ideal, but you have to, you have to make a decision. I know. And it's so much fun. Time travel, I get it. It's irresistible fun. Yeah.

I mean, you get to put on the costumes. But, no, yeah, that is an interesting, that's an interesting premise that it, the, the universe will protect itself at all costs. Yeah, that's right. Now, and in the case where you can change the past and fix the timeline, probably this will just be ignored going forward, but won't there be a forever temptation, whenever anything goes wrong to go to the past and fix it? I mean, here's a question for the, I'm not a scientist.

I once read somewhere that time travel to the future is possible and time travel to the past is not. Yeah, that's basically true. Right. I mean, the way I joke about it is yesterday, I traveled 24 hours into the future, and here I am, right? But you move it one second per second. Einstein says you can go faster into the future, but you can never come back. Right, right, right.

So. Well, then we don't have to worry about it. Brian Green wrote a book called Icarus at the edge of time. He wrote a children's book. And I was a little surprised that this counted as a children's book because, you know, Icarus is the spaceship traveled close to a black hole and Icarus, the young child was stranded near the black hole and then rejoined the rest of civilization later. But because of time dilation,

hundreds of years had passed and all, his family was dead and everything. I'm like, that's a pretty dark children's book. Yeah. What is the lesson we're learning here? Yeah. What if a sci-fi fan is looking to expand their education as far as,

legitimate science. You've written a bunch of books. Yeah. What's like the first Sean Carroll? I have a book coming out in September called Something Deeply Hidden About the Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics, about the idea, which I actually think is true, not science fiction, that when you observe a quantum system, the world branches into multiple copies,

in each of which you've got a different outcome. And sadly, you can't talk to each other, right? The different, that's, that's, but I can easily imagine, science fiction scenarios that were just very slight variations on that theme where you could talk to each other or influence, right? Like make different choices. You're like parallel. They're parallel universes. Yeah. And like I say, I think this is actually real. I don't think that this is science fiction. And we don't know for sure. So they would have to be infinite, obviously, right? Because at least a very large number, not necessarily infant. We don't know.

Because everything is the same except this water bottle is a little further to the right. Yeah. that other universe. So in your body, for example, a nuclear decay happens 5,000 times a second. So that means in every one of those decays, that's why I've been so tired. I know. Every one of them makes a new universe, right? So two to the 5,000 universes are great every second just because of you decaying. So that's not infinity, but it's a very large number of universes, yes.

And there's an app on your iPhone where you can split the universe intentionally and then do different things depending on what the outcome was. Oh, well, that's great. So, yeah, so that's coming out in September. And, yeah, I think the influence that science has on science fiction is a mixed bag, right? Like, it can easily hamstrung you, hamstring you. But it can also inspire you, you know? That's the big, and it's interesting, that's where I think Hollywood is a little off track right now. Because I think there's a heavy, heavy focus on, on fuel.

The fear of science and the fear of science gone wrong and a lot less of the potential. And I remember that kind of the 90s, it was completely the opposite. Every sci-fi television series was about, hey, we figured this out. I mean, even the terrible show like SeaQuest. Look at that. They figured that out. You know, it was about the positivity of it, the adventure and the striving. And now it's just.

We all love the expanse, but it's a little depressing sometimes. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, we, you have to have that in storytelling or, or you just, you really start to, it just becomes a drag. And that's kind of how it is right now. One of the great classic sci-fi themes was always competence, right? Like these people were super smart. They could solve puzzles. They're people you want to be like. Yeah.

And I think that there's plenty of satisfying stories to be written about people doing good things for good reasons. All right. So I hear you have other things going on. We'll briefly mention those, right? Sure. You have an album coming out. Is that true? Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, that's the, yeah, once in a while, that's out. You don't have to do this because my publicist told you. Well, yeah, there might be people's audience who care. They might be interested. Yeah, we have a handful of orchestral albums that we recorded at Abbey Road that are out on iTunes that are, that are, that are. Abby Road, that's exciting. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, if you like.

Well, I mean, it's pressure, I guess. If you like orchestral jazz, that's, that's, that's, uh, that's, uh, that's, that's, uh, that's, It's a good place to look. Okay. Very, very good. And congrats, Orville Season 3 is going to happen, obviously. So are you, what stage of the process are you in now? We're in writing mode.

We've written about, we've broken about five. We have our season pretty much mapped out. We've broken about five stories and we're deep in the writing. It's another 13 episode kind of thing. As of now, it's another 13, yeah. Yeah, that's the standard these days. Yeah, well, it's... I was a child.

It was 26. Yeah. I don't know how they did that. I mean, and granted, part of it is that television, the television viewer expects more now. They want, you know, cable and streaming have made, as Rick Berman used to say, made people relatively spoiled. Like, they want it to look like a movie every week. And that's fine, but it just takes time and it means you can't do as many.

Things don't move faster just because of technology. You still have to film actors doing things. You still need those pieces in editing. And so 13 is usually in production, I will say from my standpoint, 13 episodes in is usually when I start to come apart. When I start to kind of stare at myself in the mirror and go, I don't know if I can go a second longer. Inevitably, the end of both our first two seasons,

that was when I just hit the wall. And I'm not in this very deeply, but I have this feeling that for features, there's often this feeling like we'll film a bunch of stuff and then make the movie by editing them together in the right way whereas for your for weekly TV series you better get you better know what you're doing ahead of time I mean look honestly that's that's a that happens on both

in both television and movies if you know sometimes the director is understands editing sometimes I mean to me the best directors really have a sense of they they know enough to know that your editor is as much a director as you are. I mean, if you can shoot with an idea towards how you're going to edit this thing, you're a lot better off. Because, I mean, also, editors hate it when directors will say,

let the editor figure it out, just give you all this stuff. They like, I mean, at least the ones that I've worked with, they like to have some sort of a sense that there is a vision, that there is a shape to this and you're not just asking them to clean up your mess. you know John Casar who who directed God the lion's share of 24 is our kind of main onset EP director for the Orville and he's I mean he's just a fantastic director when it comes to editing he just he just has it has it in his head and you get into that edit bay and it's just all there so but as someone who's You've been on both sides. Is there more discipline on the TV side just because of the scheduling? Not necessarily. There's there's some really great directors in television and some really bad directors in television. And it's the same for film. It's, it's a and it's because it's, God, I mean, when I directed Ted, I got on set and I was, I had, I had no idea. I've written a script. I kind of knew what I, what I wanted this thing to look like. I'd work years in animation. So I had some sense of. you know, scene composition and all that, but relatively green.

And it occurred to me that there must be a lot of people like this who show up on set in the director's chair and really don't belong there yet. Yeah. I mean, I had to ask my, my director of photography, you know, okay, so what's a 50-50? What's an over? Over is when you have the back of one character, you see a piece of them, and then here's the other character over here. Did you go to film school at all?

So I did, but, but I mean, I was, I majored, you know, it was a concentration in animation. Okay. I see. But even then, you know, I just, I don't remember the Hollywood terms being bandied about. And, uh, and, and it's, and I think there's, look, I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot of talent and there's a lot of fraudulence out there. And you just hope that you get.

You know, I've been lucky enough to work with a lot of talented directors. Um, but there are, uh, there are, there are some where the editor has to clean up the mess. Well, we're all looking forward to season three. I'm very excited. When is it premier? Do we know? Premiers, it's looking like fall of 2020. It might be a little sooner.

Okay. But, yeah, it's, I know, it seems like a long time. It does. Yes. Don't quote me on that. That's not in stone. No, I understand. It may be sooner, but it's, that's, that's the last thing that I heard because

it's, because we can't get it done in time. With all the work this show takes, we can't get it done in time for January. Okay. And if you're on a network, it's either January or the fall. It's a crazy town we live in here. Yeah, a lot of fun things going on. All right, Seth McQuarr. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Thanks so much. Hey, y'all, it's Brittany Kelly, founder of Tribe Kelly. We're a family-owned brand built on a simple idea. To create American-made pieces that feel as good as they look, everything we do is proudly made in the USA from start to finish, with a focus on quality, comfort, and longevity. These are the kinds of pieces you live in, the ones that get softer with time and stay with you for years.

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