Velma
HBO Max
Velma always seemed like a bit of a weird experiment, a reimagining of Scooby Doo in adult animation format, where the danger is real and the jokes are crazier. It could have worked, but by all appearances…it doesn’t. Not at all.
The first two episodes of Velma have arrived on HBO Max. They didn’t really impress critics, but audience reviews? These are brutal.
Currently, Velma is rated a very poor 50% for HBO-Max by critics on Rotten Tomatoes and only has a 9% from hundreds of audience ratings.
Velma
HBO Max
Before you jump in and say, “Well, that’s a criticism of people bombing the show for diversifying the cast,” that’s … kind of one of the weirdest things here. Velma seems to anger both sides of his potential audience here. Sure, there will be the usual “diversity recasting” haters, but if you watch the show for yourself, it feels like it’s almost making fun of shows that do diversity casting or social messaging. It’s led to what you might have assumed would be a more left-leaning fan base for the show, to blame creator Mindy Kaling for actually making it a somewhat conservative project given people’s previous comments she’s made , and citing things like her fondness for JK Rowling’s recent tweets as evidence of her personal views.
Most importantly, it feels like the humor really doesn’t appeal to an audience. The show feels like it’s trying to tease everyone who sees it, and the Scooby Doo IP seems almost secondary to the whole concept. Scooby Doo has enjoyed great success as both children’s animated films and live action films over the years, and while it’s possible that an animated version of the concept could have worked for adults, this iteration seems to have rubbed all potential viewers the wrong way . This is a show where Daphne and Velma finally share a kiss, and yet its potentially liberal audience is writing it off because it all feels so antagonistic.
It’s a shame, because this really is a star cast. Constance Wu, Sam Richardson, Glenn Howerton. And I’ve certainly liked Kaling’s work before, be it back in The Office, The Mindy Project or most recently Never Have I Ever. But Velma? Something has gone terribly wrong here, and it’s getting roasted harder than pretty much every new show I’ve watched on Netflix since The Witcher: Blood Origin. Although even that eventually climbed to 13% viewership. At the moment, Velma really has nothing else to compare it to when it comes to how poorly it performs, and it can’t blame a politically-driven review-bombing campaign, as both sides of the aisle are there for different reasons dislike. What a bizarre situation.
Update (1/15): Time hasn’t helped this as more people have watched the show, which HBO now says will premiere the most-watched Max original animated series of all time (not that there’s much else to compare, even Harley Quinn premiered at DC Universe).
- With nearly 3,000 reviews, Velma has a 7% viewership rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
- Velma has a 0.4/10 in user reviews on Metacritic (59/100 from critics).
- Velma has a 1.4/5 viewer rating on Google.
- With nearly 9,000 votes cast, Velma has a 1.7/10 on IMDB.
In short, Velma hit the Holy Trinity: she’s actually being bombarded by right-wing viewers complaining about “woke” content. And yet, unlike other series that do, left-wing viewers find the show disrespectful and also rate it low. Not because of “bright” content, but because it’s just… bad. And then there’s the third pillar, disgruntled Scooby Doo fans who like the classic series and IP and hate it being used in this way for a bad adult cartoon. That might actually be the largest group based on the reviews I read online.
Mindy Kaling has continued to draw anger for Velma online, with many citing her constant “self-insertion” on her series, with the repeated theme of an Indian girl desperate for white attention also present on her other shows.
But it was also mentioned that Charlie Grandy is actually believed to be the creator of Velma. Grandy was a frequent associate of Kaling and was accused in the wake of Velma’s troubles of being a case of “nepotism,” the son of a former Love Boat star and congressman whose mother is a Hollywood television writer. Things have gotten pretty personal with these two, and many are looking for explanations as to why Velma is so bad.
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