I'll admit, I was skeptical when I first heard about The Orville. I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation as a teenager, and I laugh at Family Guy as much as the next person, but MacFarlane was going to need to do more than just throw around jokes in space to make the show work. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed the result...mostly.
When The Orville is being a spiritual successor to Star Trek, it's really good. Anyone who has watched much Star Trek is going to recognize a lot of the plotlines, some of which feel like they were lifted wholesale from episodes of one or the other of the Star Trek series. Not to mention the characters, who feel like the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew, right down to alien officers and an android. But whether lifting old plots or doing something original, The Orville does space exploration opera well.
Where The Orville falls short, in my opinion, is when it forgets that it's about the future. For instance, the first two episodes of the second season, which as far as I'm concerned could have happened in any generic suburb instead of on a futuristic spaceship. Outside of a few minutes on a shuttle performing a planetary rescue mission, both episodes were all about relationship drama and personal failings. Those things are important, but should be secondary to the futuristic space heroics, not the other way around.
As long as The Orville continues to stick to space exploration and dealing with alien races, I'll keep watching. Hopefully the ratings are such that Fox keeps it around for a while.
