Adrianne Palicki has a knack for being ahead of her time. She had a star-making role on the NBC drama Friday Night Lights, which when it premiered in 2006 brought the cinematic, character-driven style we know now as “prestige TV” to a network landscape that didn’t know what to do with it.

Palicki left Friday Night Lights after three seasons and moved on to what seemed like a guaranteed big deal: playing Diana Prince on the first live-action Wonder Woman TV series since Lynda Carter hung up the lasso in 1979. Photos of Palicki in costume went viral—but the show, developed by David E. Kelley, was never picked up. Six years later, a different, big-screen Wonder Woman is one of the highest-grossing hits of 2017. Looking back now, Palicki suggests, “The reason the show didn’t go is it was maybe two years too early.”

But this fall, Palicki seems fully in tune with the times with her role on The Orville, a comedic riff on the Star Trek template that’s so well timed, in fact, that it premiered the same month as a brand-new official Star Trek series on CBS All Access. It only takes a few minutes of watching The Orville, though, to know that you’re in uncharted territory. Seth MacFarlane, who also created the series, stars as the captain of the U.S.S. Orville, who sees the assignment as a way to move past the end of his marriage—that is, until his ex, played by Palicki, turns out to be his first officer.

This isn’t a show about squabbling exes (though, yes, there’s a decent amount of that). Palicki and MacFarlane’s characters work up a grudging respect and camaraderie, which wasn’t tough for them; the actors met campaigning for Barack Obama in Ohio in 2008, speaking to college students. “It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, and I moved out to Los Angeles by myself when I was 18,” Palicki says now. But it was the kind of scary that forged a “dear, dear friendship,” and meant that by the time they stepped on the bridge of the Orville, that kind of chemistry was “old hat for us.”

The Orville has moments of deep silliness familiar to MacFarlane fans, but also surprising moments of emotion and grace; the third episode, for example, takes place on a starship under the thumb of a ruthless theocracy that kidnaps and tortures Palicki’s character. “I can compare this to Friday Night Lights in a sense,” Palicki says. “This is a show that, yes, happens to take place in space, like that was a show that happened to be surrounding football. But it wasn’t about football. This isn’t about space. The reason it’s so grounded is because it’s grounded in reality. You could be taking us off the spaceship and have the exact same situations happen.”

There may still be Star Trek fans who aren’t ready to see a ship full of brave explorers who can’t resist pee jokes, but at least Palicki is ready for them. “Nothing was scarier than stepping into the shoes of Wonder Woman when I did that pilot,” she said. “That was probably the scariest thing as an actor that I’ve ever done, because the stakes were so high. Having gone through that really braced me for the rest of it. If I can get through that and they liked me, I think I’m going to be O.K.”