The Orville producer gives us the scoop on season 2 - plus, all the other big sci-fi spots from SFX's Ultimate 2019 Preview

The Orville's first season was an unexpected success, in part because expectations were fairly low. But now that we've seen that the Star Trek parody from the dude who brought us Family Guy is actually good in its own right (pleasing Trek fans who welcomed a break from the dramatics of Star Trek Discovery as well as general audiences), how will its sophomore season surprise us? Especially with some pretty stiff sci-fi competition out there, from Discovery, Black Mirror, and beyond?

Executive producer David A. Goodman gave our sister publication SFX magazine the scoop for its Ultimate 2019 Preview of everything sci-fi: “You don’t want to repeat,” Goodman says. “You want to do something new, so the constraint is finding original ideas that haven’t been done, and doing them well. The freedom is that nobody has been doing this kind of science fiction as metaphor in an action-adventure drama format for a long time.”

Goodman said The Orville's team has been wracking their brains trying to figure out just what they want to say this season and how best to use their platform as a sci-fi show. He thinks some of the most interesting material will come from the extraterrestrial members of The Orville's crew and other non-human spacefarers.

"You’re going to see some great new stuff in terms of aliens and races," Goodman tells SFX. "We learn a little bit more about Isaac. We’re seeing some more Moclans. The stories that we’ve come up with involving those species are really compelling and exciting. and then we meet some great new aliens that are both humanoid and non-humanoid.”

You'll find many more humanoid and non-humanoid interests in SFX's sprawling Ultimate 2019 Preview. Here are some quick teasers for what you can expect when you pick it up:

A dive into how Star Wars: The Mandalorian will fill in the blanks between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.
An early look at Star Trek Discovery season 2, featuring Captain Pike and a young Spock.
How the BBC's War of the Worlds is more of a "Victorian ghost story" than action-packed alien showdown.

And a heck of a lot more on the biggest sci-fi stuff coming in 2019. Pick up the full issue to read it all!

Find SFX's Ultimate 2019 Preview and more in the latest issue of SFX Magazine, out now. And make sure you subscribe so you never miss an issue.

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar+.

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