The Orville Season 2 Will Have Longer Episodes, Thanks to New Ad Program

Depending on who you ask, Seth McFarlane's The Orville is either a poor man's Sci-Fi series or one of the best Star Trek-like shows around, with some old-school Trekkies even preferring it over Star Trek: Discovery. With the first season seemingly doing well in the ratings, the second season will be debuting very soon and it turns out that the show will have longer episodes as a result of a successful advertisement program.

Speaking with USA Today, McFarlane explained that the second season has a partnership with an experimental program that creates a different balance between ad and programming time. It has resulted in the episodes being seven or eight minutes longer than before, which is actually a lot when you think about adding certain elements or storylines to the episode.

"We're part of this new, experimental program that creates a different balance between ad time and programming time, so the episodes are about seven or eight minutes longer than last year [that] allows you to let things breathe in a way that streaming shows are able to do. That's been a big boon for our storytelling process."

The Family Guy and American Dad creator also revealed that The Orville season 2 will have a much bigger budget than season 1. McFarlane stated that audiences will be surprised by the amount of quality CGI they will be seeing when the new season debuts, which is needed for a series that explores alien worlds and has space battles from time to time.

McFarlane's The Orville premieres this Sunday on FOX. The series stars Seth MacFarlane, Adrianne Palicki, Scott Grimes, Peter Macon, Penny Johnson Jerald, Halston Sage, J. Lee, and Mark Jackson.

Read:Seth MacFarlane and Crew Return in New Teaser for The Orville 2