The Orville lovers are patiently awaiting the series’s third season debut on Hulu. Star Peter Macon, who performs Bortus, offered a behind-the-scenes look at the production. On Instagram, Macon shared a photo of himself masked up and in full Bortus makeup. “Late Night Mountain Shooting all up at the Hummingbird Ranch/Ponda Rosa,” he writes. “THE ORVILLE.03… we’re cooking with hot dirt over here y’all… stand by.” It is possible to have a peek at the photo embedded below. The Orville declared production on its third year after confronting delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, creator/star Seth MacFarlane provided an update.
“All I can say is we’re working on it,” MacFarlane said. “We are working really hard. We got struck by this like everybody else, but we are working on it. We will be back shortly, people. There has been a lot of speculation online: Can the show come back? The series remains a huge priority for me personally and for the cast and everyone else. We do have a year to finish, and we will complete it. For a show with a great deal of prosthetic makeup which needs close contact, a lot of background artists, it is a major job, and you want to be sure that you do it in a way that keeps everyone safe and protected. After we’ve got those protocols figured out, we will begin again and you’ll receive more Orville.”
Orville’s third period is that the show’s first as a Hulu original, leaving FOX behind. In a statement announcing that the transition, MacFarlane stated, “The Orville was a labor of love for me, and now there are two firms that have supported that vision in a big way: 20th Century Fox Television, where I’ve had a bargain since the beginning of my profession, and FOX Broadcasting Company, now FOX Entertainment, that was my broadcast house for over 20 decades. My buddies at the community knew what I was attempting to do with this series, and they’ve done a spectacular job of marketing, starting, and programming it for all these past 2 seasons.
But while the series has developed and become harder production-wise, I determined that I wouldn’t have the capability to send episodes until 2020, which would be challenging for the community. So we began to talk about how best to encourage the third year in ways that worked for the series. It is exactly this kind of openness to accommodate a series’s creative demands that have made me want to stay around for such a long time. I am hugely indebted to Charlie Collier and FOX Entertainment because of their generosity and look forward to developing future projects there. And to my friends at Hulu, I look forward to our new partnership exploring the galaxy together.”