I'm only just recently watching season 3 with my girlfriend.

The Orville has actually gotten better every season. Season 1 was kindof dumb and didn't know where it was going, but by season 3 Seth Macfarlane clearly told the writers "just make TNG episodes" and it works pretty well.

One thing I realized with the show is that it isn't Star Trek, it's a Star Trek LARP by Seth Macfarlane and his friends. The weakest part of the show is that some of the actors suck because they're literally just his friends. The worst offender is the black engineer guy. He can barely say his lines and has 0 acting skill, so it is really awkward. Also almost all the characters act like Current Day people, and even use slang and sayings that only make sense for present day people. Hence the whole show feels like a LARP and not the real thing.

Seth Macfarlane is obviously woke, but strangely he has gone out of his way to make the messages of his show nuanced. Here are 2 examples:

1. So one of the aliens and best actors on the show is a dude named Bortus who is basically their Worf. He is a Moclan, a race of beefy dudes who are 100% male and despise females to the point where anyone born female is forcibly transed to male as a newborn. He has a daughter. In a prior season, there is a whole blowup over whether to trans her, but the Moclan government and Bortus' trad husband win and she gets turned male. Well, Season 3 she's older and suddenly she starts getting weird and possibly suicidal, so the Karen 1st officer sticks her nose in and gives her hints that she was born female, without fully telling her. She finds out the truth, freaks out, then there is a whole blowup where the trad dad refuses to let her de transition while Bortus allows it. Trad dad is cast as the villain and humiliated, basically.

What makes this nuanced is that a woke person could see this as supporting their trans shit, but if you look at it: the whole message is AGAINST transing the kids! It's basically saying that parents should not impose their will on their kids, which is exactly the whole mindfuck social contagion happening now in libtard cities where libtard white women are manipulating and pressuring their kids to be trans. Again, you can interpret it both ways. It's not explicitly preaching a libtard message. That's legitimately impressive storytelling similar to the legacy of TNG.

2. There is an episode trying to get an alliance with a matriarchal race where the women dominate the men and the men are basically slaves with no rights. The ship plans to pretend to be the same way to win the feminist aliens to their side. So the Karen 1st officer pretends to be Captain while Seth is her lackey. It's played for laughs at first, but the Captain & other men on the ship legitimately get treated like dirt to the point where you feel bad for them, and then it gets pushed too far where the alien chicks start trying to treat them as sex slaves. The alien feminists are not portrayed as sympathetic or "good", they're cold hard bitches. Again, there isn't really any preaching, and a feminist could watch the episode and be like "hell yeah!" while Imp could watch it and be like "I'd like to order an exterminatus".

I'm not saying the show is a classic like TNG or anything, but I think Seth is trying hard to follow the spirit of TNG without copying it, and making his own thing. He's been learning and improving each season, and I think it's been getting better.