Seth MacFarlane has announced that The Orville will be moving from Fox to Hulu for its third season, with new episodes expected to be released at the end of 2020.
As reported by Variety, MacFarlane made the announcement at The Orville’s San Diego Comic-Con panel and, according to a source, “MacFarlane’s current workload and the length of time it takes to finish work on the show’s numerous special effects sequences would have meant that Season 3 would not have been ready for a midseason debut.”
“The Orville’ has been a labor of love for me, and there are two companies which have supported that vision in a big way: 20th Century Fox Television, where I’ve had a deal since the start of my career, and Fox Broadcasting Company, now Fox Entertainment, which has been my broadcast home for over 20 years,” MacFarlane said in a statement. “My friends at the network understood what I was trying to do with this series, and they’ve done a spectacular job of marketing, launching and programming it for these past two seasons. But as the show has evolved and become more ambitious production-wise, I determined that I would not be able to deliver episodes until 2020, which would be challenging for the network. So we began to discuss how best to support the third season in a way that worked for the show. It’s exactly this kind of willingness to accommodate a show’s creative needs that’s made me want to stick around for so long. I am hugely indebted to Charlie Collier and Fox Entertainment for their generosity and look forward to developing future projects there. And to my new friends at Hulu, I look forward to our new partnership exploring the galaxy together.”
Source: IGN.com Seth MacFarlane's The Orville to Move from Fox to Hulu for Season 3