I read an interview with his sister (she is also a voice actor on his cartoons and does the voice of the computer on the show). She said that everything he's done to this point - Family Guy, American Dad, Ted, etc - was to get up enough capital with the studios to make The Orville. He's been a Star Trek geek since he was a little kid and all he's ever wanted to do was to write a Star Trek series. Given he was never going to be actually allowed to write a Star Trek show, he's done the Aldi version of it. You can really see how much this guy loves classic Star Trek with these episodes. In so many of them you just replace 'Orville' with 'Enterprise' and 'Krill' with 'Klingon' and you've got a Next Generation episode.