I don’t understand all the reviewer negativity for Orville. As star trek lite isn’t this pretty much exactly what you’d want or expect?

I too was a bit confused by the show’s aim. At first on the first episode I thought “oh this is a show showing a guy who has to struggle to survive the impossible odds of behaving mostly rationally but getting arrested for a crime he didn’t do, but totally looks like he did do.” It was Naz’s one bad decision leading…

I do think that Malloy not knowing the US capital goes against his knowledge of pop-culture. He surely has seen things like White-House down.

This review is a demonstration of why it’s hard to have nice things. Every time something is nice and awesome over and over and continues to impress some people will indulge in this pseudo-critical analysis of “gosh I hope all this quality isn’t a bad sign” or something like that.

So was there something going on with “Real Rick” this episode? The teacher leaving the Morty academy had “Real Rick” drool under his lip and isn’t that the way we are supposed to tell Real Rick apart from fake ones??

There are a few things at play here. Firstly I think removing the more toxic elements of their personality creates a vacuum pretty quick. They went through the machine only once, so it’s not like he was getting reset over and over. So his intelligence tempered his kindness and Morty’s confidence spiraled into…

Well technically since the machine only removes what a person perceives to be their own toxicity I don’t know how he would change. Maybe he is self-aware enough to know how needy for approval he is and wish that gone.

Yes it does. Pointlessness is dumb, and even if it's pointlessness as a willful choice to examine the nature of pointlessness it is dumb, don't let desperate art majors tell you otherwise.

The one concern I have with the show is that it can go to the well of "what seemed like sincere narrative choice was part of the plan all along". Even if you are making a commentary about humanity and choice, entertainment where none of the characters have narrative agency is no fun to watch.

Many reviewers are bad, but this AVClub reviewer is not that bad, he is just looking at this show through too cynical and dismissive a lens.

I disagree with that conclusion of LOST, I think the lesson there is something Vince Gilligan has been quoted as saying, something to the effect of "never start a show if you don't know where it's going to end" (he probably said it better)

I liked it a lot too, though I'd prefer if there was more clarity because honestly the way he was getting legitimately roughed up by people (including the horse rope thing) seemed to imply the game had already become real, but his reaction to the bullet implied that it wasn't real until that point.

He looked like early William.

If you rigorously look for reasons to be disappointed, you will almost always find purchase.

The photograph pretty much revealed the 2 timeline twist and yet as a relatively smart viewer I let that temporal incongruity pass unchallenged.

Yeah I watched all these episodes over a single week and didn't read anything online when I did and I thought it all worked fine.

Can we nip this idea that exposition is bad? I've heard it argued as a given that all exposition is bad, yet in narratives about ideas exposition is often a thick helping of 'ideas'. I don't get how people can care about plot and narrative but loathe exposition, a thing that advances plot and narrative.

You think that's bad? My full name is Sylvester 'Deputy Foss' Rebus

I like how we can reference things and everybody knows what everybody is talking about.

It's a Christopher Nolan directed film. But you seem to be acting like a writer isn't that big a deal. A writer often is the main creative voice of something.