The Orville has earned its first-ever Emmy Award nomination. The season two episode "Identity, Part 2" is nominated for Outstanding Visual Effects. This is the episode that featured the large-scale space battle between the Kaylon fleet and the combined forces of the Planetary Union and the Krill. It will be up against Game of Thrones, The Man in the High Castle, Star Trek: Discovery, and The Umbrella Academy.

The news follows The Orville earning three nominations from this year's Saturn Awards for excellence in genre fiction. Those include an overall series nomination and individual performance nominations for stars Seth MacFarlane and Adrianne Palicki.

The Orville is set 400 years in the future and follows the adventures of the USS Orville. The vessel is a mid-level exploratory spaceship with a crew of humans and aliens. Together they face the wonders and dangers found in outer space, as well as the more mundane issues that come with everyday life on a starship.

MacFarlane created The Orville and stars as the ship's captain, Ed Mercer. Palicki plays Cmdr. Kelly Grayson, Ed's first officer as well as his ex-wife. Other cast members include Penny Johnson Jerald, Scott Grimes, Peter Macon, J Lee, Mark Jackson, Chad L. Coleman, and Jessica Szohr.

The Orville is now considered a contender for the Emmy Awards. MacFarlane has explained that the original plan for the show was to be more of a comedy. He now admits but that may have been a subconscious cover story to make the real show he wanted to create.

“When we began this, it was designed to be a little bit more of a hybrid, straddling the line pretty evenly between comedy and drama,” MacFarlane said. “I have been a big sci-fi fan since I was a kid. I think secretly that was the show I wanted to do, but I figured there’s no way in hell anyone would swallow that from me.”

MacFarlane thinks going with the more serious tone for The Orville was the right decision. “With an hourlong show, in order to sustain it, you have to have real stakes,” he said. “That was my fear at the beginning. If people aren’t with us on that side of it, we’re probably not going to last very long. But they were, so we really leaned into that.”

Should The Orville win an Emmy Award? Let us know what you think in the comments.