Yeah, it would've just been the trailers that I was going off of, since I haven't properly seen Discovery (I also never finished watching The Orville). And I think trailers tend to have more network interference. And sometimes network interference isn't even really a bad thing.
I was thinking more along the lines of how the forced comedy in The Orville seemed like it was based in network interference to me, and at least some of that pressure shifted away from The Orville and towards Discovery, but then Lower Decks seemed to slip by and do it's own thing very naturally. I could be mistaken. Lower Decks could have been a production nightmare, but it came through in the end making everything look easy.
So up front, I'm a big fan of Orville. It's got it's issues, and it's basically "Seth McFarland's The Next Generation", but that's ok, because no one else is going to make that show in live action these days. The humor in season 1, especially the early part of the first season of Orville was pretty forced feeling, and smacked of interference by the suits at Fox. It was a Seth McFarland show, so that equals Family Guy/American Dad, right? At least in their heads it does. That carries through the first couple of episodes, until you get to "About a Girl", which was a classic TNG style courtroom episode, and that sold me on the show. Season 2 jettisons most of the unnatural humor and just becomes good. There are still jokes, but they're built around the characters and situations, like the "pee corner" when the crew is held hostage in the shuttlebay in the "Identity" two parter. It's funny, but it's also realistic based on the situation that they're in. Season 2 is a marked improvement, and I'm still hoping we
might one day get that season 3 on Hulu. It's Trek, in all but it's name, but it's also a style of Trek we don't get any more.
Lower Decks, is kind of the same thing, and it has the Trek name. I was kind of turned off after the first episode because I wasn't prepared for just how rapid fire the dialogue was going to be. Once I settled into the flow of the show, I grew quickly on me, and I was fully invested by the end.
I don't think that Lower Decks and Orville negate one another, just like the existence of Orville isn't a "response" to Discovery. Lower Decks and Orville come from a love of the same source material, and it's great that we went from having no episodic, story of the week, Trek style sci-fi shows, to having two, both of which are pretty good. I want more of both!
P.S.: I also love that McFarland even went so far with the Orville's effects as to do practical model filming for some shots. That's a big plus in my book.
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