It's starting to feel feel like the tone and feel they're going for is "Star Trek: TNG but with a ship full of people who don't take themselves as seriously as those stuffy Enterprise people do".
I liked TNG when it was on, and it'd be nice to have a space show that wasn't trying to do a big complicated arc with deep secrets that the writers will get around to deciding on the answers to if they get renewed again, but I'm not quite sure The Orville has figured out where to go with this, either. I kind of worry it'll turn into "Star Trek: TNG Season 8, but with a token rude joke in the teaser each week". (Which I suspect I would still watch, but...)
I'm hoping it settles into something with kind of the relationship shows like Due South or Castle had to "regular" cop shows. (Not that those shows were particularly similar to each other, but they each were different than a typical cop show in their own way and didn't take the genre as a completely serious thing.) (I'd find it particularly amusing if they went the full Due South route and eventually threw away all attempts to make sense in favor of basing entire episodes around Stan Rogers songs, but that's a pretty specific thing to want and it's probably just me and a few of my closest friends rooting for that.)