This teaser for The Orville's Hulu debut is weirdly somber and sincere

Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville has been one of the weirdest science-fiction shows on television for a few years now, not because it’s radically ambitious, necessarily, but because it’s kind of not: The series primarily exists as a fairly straight attempt to marry two things that probably shouldn’t go together—MacFarlane’s famously coarse humor, and his deep, personal love of Star Trek: The Next Generation—into a single workable package. The end result was a series that, for two seasons on Fox, seemed to turn its sincerity on and off like a light switch, inducing whiplash, and, occasionally, actual interest in its target audience of Star Trek fans/Star Trek parody fans.

Now it’s coming back, courtesy of Hulu, with a new teaser for the upcoming arrival of Orville: New Horizons. Or, like, half-back? Because we’ll be danged if we can find even a single joke in this audio-only teaser released today, which instead features the show’s various characters saying Star Trek-y things from old episodes to each other in a way that is presumably pretty emotional. if you’re a fan of The Orville.

The series—which stars MacFarlane, Adrianna Palicki, Penny Johnson Jerald, Scott Grimes, and Peter Macon—has been off the air since 2019, having had its production delayed by COVID. The show was moved over to Hulu as part of the big Disney acquisition of Fox, ensuring that the adventures of the Orville would continue in streaming land (sadly minus the contributions of the late Norm Macdonald, who had a recurring part as the voice of what we’re going to respectfully label “some kind of slime monster”). The series stars MacFarlane as Captain Ed Mercer, a character who’s pretty much “What if Seth MacFarlane was a space captain?” who has to navigate both a dysfunctional crew, and serving alongside a first officer (Palicki) who he used to be married to. The series arrives on Hulu on March 10, 2022.