Very
Velma has always seemed like a bit of an odd experiment, a remake of Scooby Doo in an adult animation format where the danger is real and the jokes are coarser. It could have worked, but apparently… it doesn’t. Not at all.
The first two episodes of Velma have arrived on HBO Max. The critics weren’t really impressed, but the audience reviews? They are brutal.
Currently, Velma is reviewing with a very poor HBO-Max rating of 50% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and only 9% out of hundreds of audience ratings.
Very
Before you jump in and say “okay, this is a review of people bombing the show because it makes the cast more diverse”, that’s… one of the weirdest things. Velma seems upset both sides of your potential audience. Sure, there are the usual “diversity recast” haters, but if you watch the show itself, you get the feeling that make fun shows that do diversity casting or social news. What you might have assumed would be a more left-leaning fan base has led to creator Mindy Kaling being accused of actually being a bit conservative people cite past comments she’s made and things like her favorite recent JK Rowling tweets as evidence of her personal views.
Above all, I feel that the humor is not appropriate for any audience. The show feels like it’s trying to annoy everyone who watches it, and the Scooby Doo IP seems secondary to the whole concept. Scooby Doo has seen great success over the years as both an animated children’s film and a live-action film, and while it’s possible that some adult version of the concept could work with adult animation, this iteration seems to have rubbed off on all potential audiences. from the wrong direction. This is the show where Daphne and Velma finally kiss, and yet the potential liberal audience writes her off because it all feels antagonistic.
It’s a shame because this is a really stellar cast. Constance Wu, Sam Richardson, Glenn Howerton. And I’ve certainly enjoyed Kaling’s work before, whether it was on The Office, The Mindy Project, or most recently, Never Have I Ever. But Velma? Something has gone deeply wrong here, and it’s frying harder than pretty much any new show I’ve seen since The Witcher: Blood Origin on Netflix. Although even that eventually climbed to 13% viewership. Right now, Velma really has nothing to compare it to in terms of how bad its score is, and you can’t blame a politically driven campaign for bombing reviews. both sides of the aisle don’t like it for various reasons. What a bizarre situation.
Update (1/15): Time hasn’t helped, with more people watching the series, which HBO now says is its most-watched premiere of an original Max animated series ever (not that it compares, even Harley Quinn premiered on DC Universe).
- With nearly 3,000 reviews, Velma has a 7% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
- Velma has a 0.4/10 in user reviews on Metacritic (59/100 from critics).
- Velma has an audience score of 1.4/5 on Google.
- With nearly 9,000 votes, Velma has a 1.7/10 on IMDB.
In short, Velma hits the holy trinity: It’s actually being bombarded by right-wing viewers who complain about “woke” content. And yet, unlike other shows that do, left-wing viewers don’t find the show defensible, and yes Too low score. Not because of the “awakened” content, but because it’s just… bad. And then you have the third pillar that upsets Scooby Doo fans who love the classic series and IP and hate that it’s being used in this way for a bad adult cartoon. This may actually be the largest group based on the reviews I read online.
Mindy Kaling continues to draw ire for Velma online, with many citing her constant “insertion” of her series with the recurring theme of an Indian girl desperate for white attention, which is also in place in her other shows.
But it was also brought up that Charlie Grandy is actually believed to be the creator of Velma. Grandy was a frequent collaborator of Kalinga and was accused of “nepotism” after problems with Velma, the son of the former Love Boat star and a congressman, with his mother, a Hollywood television writer. It’s quite personal with both of them and many are looking for an explanation as to why Velma is this bad.
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