Consider this a red alert to TV fans everywhere: Are you expecting Seth MacFarlane’s new Fox series The Orville to be a fun Star Trek parody packed with wall-to-wall jokes? Two words of advice: Abandon ship.

Despite what Fox’s official site claims, The Orville — premiering this Sunday at 8/7c — is not a “hilarious comedy.” It’s not even a comedy. Yes, there are a few Family Guy-esque punchlines scattered throughout, but as bafflingly as this sounds, The Orville is mostly a straightforward drama… and not a very good one, at that. Riddled with sci-fi clichés and paralyzed by a grim self-importance, MacFarlane’s shiny new vessel ends up being a colossal dud that not only fails to take flight, it short-circuits before it even gets out of the docking bay.

At times, “Orville” feels like an uncomplicated paean to the original “Star Trek.” There are a few moments of humor, but they feel half-hearted, almost as though someone said, “Hey, you created ‘Family Guy.’ Write something funny.” At other times, the show wants to make social commentary.

Ads for Fox’s new sci-fi series The Orville have tended to paint it as Seth MacFarlane’s Galaxy Quest, with the Family Guy creator and star riffing on Star Trek with a mix of irreverence and affection. This makes sense: MacFarlane is an unabashed Trekkie, and he’s known primarily for crude comedy (and occasional tributes to movie musicals). If that’s what MacFarlane and friends had made, it would still be a risk — MacFarlane has had many successes voicing animated or CGI characters, but the only other time he was a flesh-and-blood lead of something he created, it was A Million Ways to Die in the West — but it would be largely on-brand.

That’s not what The Orville actually is, though. (It debuts Sunday night at 8; I’ve seen the first three episodes.) Instead, it’s an hour-long drama that basically is 1990s Star Trek — or, rather, a mediocre facsimile of that era’s lamest Trek components, and with MacFarlane (who also created the series) as the lead instead of Patrick Stewart. Every five minutes or so, all the technobabble will pause so that MacFarlane or one of his co-stars (including Adrianne Palicki, Scott Grimes, Peter Macon, Chad L. Coleman, Halston Sage, and Penny Johnson Jerald) can make a joke about alien genitalia or 20th century Earth pop culture — one episode manages to combine the two — to keep the Peter Griffin fans in the audience from tuning out.