Seth MacFarlane's recent comments on The Mike Henry Show has some Orville fans excited about the potential for more episodes of the standout sieres. However, in today's entertainment landscape, there are multiple ways to bring "more" of a series to media without actually bringing it back to television or streaming.
"The Orville was a passion project. I say was, but I don't really mean 'was' because there will be more."Seth MacFarlane
As disappointing as this sounds, information on The Orville's fourth season renewal has been a long time coming, and actors need to work. So it's not plausible to believe that all the actors associated with The Orville haven't moved on to some extent. Some may even be locked into contracts they can't break simply because The Orville is renewed. So what's the workaround if the characters can't be brought back onscreen?
Other avenues of media. Novels. Comic books. Webisodes. More of The Orville could be made available through any of these and still be considered the "more" MacFarlane is referring to. I certainly hope that isn't the case, but plenty of series have continued in comic book format after a show was unceremoniously cancelled or ended its run. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, Firefly, Jericho, and Smallville, to name a few, have all been successfully continued in the comics. And The Orville is already in comic format by Darkhorse Digital Comics so it wouldn't be difficult to simply continue into the adventures written for season four.
There is, of course, also the possibility of novels that continue the journeys of Captain Mercer and his crew and even webisodes which could be shorter, possibly even six to eight minutes much like Short Treks. That would certainly lessen the financial burden of producing a full scale fourth season, but I think this is less likely than the continuation of the series in comics.
As much as we want the journeys of The Orville to play out on our screens, there is no guarantee of that happening. And, with the amount of time that has passed since season three concluded, it seems less likely than ever that we'll be able to tune in for season four.