So in the blue corner the sucessor to Gene Roddenbury's sci-fi liberal utopia and in the red corner Seth MacFarlane's spiritual comedy homage.
Fight!
Round one, characters.
Both are hitting on strong female characters (literally in the Orville's security officer), and characters of other sexual and racial backgrounds. Which is nice.
I find I'm better at remembering names or Orville crew than Discovery. Its like we keep seeing the redhead bionic girl at the discovery's con station and the daft punk robot but who are they? Why are they here?
Harry Mud has been a redeeming feature in my opinion. Well acted, well scripted and an ideal scoundrel in every way.
Round 2 Enjoyableness
Giving it to the Orville, we're exploring backstory, picking up weekly plots like the best The Next Generation ever achieved.
Micheal and Saru's constant be-atching I find more annoying than anything else. I appreciate that this is a nebulous scoring bu I look forward to sitting down for an episode of Orville whereas some Discovery episodes are a bit of grind to get though (I can handle this... after all I've see every episode of Voyager!)
Discovery is very keen to be gritty and adult with torture and sweary words and Very Serious Drama. Whereas the Orville loves the odd dick joke but still carries some weighty plotlines, one episode featuring a homosexually male dominated culture that considers baby genital reassignment surgery to be akin to fixing a cleft palate for example.
Round 3 Sets, Graphics and special effects.
Both very nice, mildly goes to Discovery for detail of spaceships but penalised a point immediatly for the daft klingon ship design. Both playing up to non Newtonian space combat tropes perfectly well.
Discovery waaaay out in front for sets, a lot more money has been thrown at building it. The Orville does look a bit Ikea here and there on interors. Depends how much you like tables I guess.
So who wins? I think I prefer the Orville, maybe I like that lighter side to space drama. Maybe I should just rewatch TNG yet again...