Who is ‘Velma’ For?

HBO Max’s new Scooby-Doo-less Scooby-Doo is a big swing and a miss.

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(Photo via IMDb.)

Mindy Kaling would have done well to speak with James Gunn about his failures writing an “adult” Scooby-Doo. Her new HBO Max series Velma fails for many of the reasons Gunn’s early-aughts live-action Scooby films did—plus a whole extra heaping of other reasons. The show’s problems are best summed up in a viral tweet:

Who indeed?

Taking a page from Gunn’s book, Kaling attempts to sex up Scooby-Doo. Taking another page from Gunn’s book, she fails miserably, with an approach to sex that a middle-school boy might deploy. The humor—if one can call it that—that Kaling and her writing team attempt to create in the show is exemplified by the fact that they’ve made a major plot point, and countless jokes, out of the fact that this show’s Fred has not experienced puberty, leaving him essentially a high school eunuch. Bizarre, tasteless, crass, and, even more unforgivably, unfunny.

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  1. Just this guy

    ‘Whom is “Velma” for?’ is the correct question, not ‘Who is “Velma” for?’ Surely an editor saw the title!

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    Amymreeves37

    Every time one of these kids' shows that I vaguely remember from my youth gets tarted up for adults, I just get frustrated that we still haven't got our prestige-TV reboot of Land of the Lost.

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    The Bell Tower

    I had to look up Mindy Kaling to remember why I forgot who she was the first time I heard of her. Wish I wasn’t reminded.

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    Cthocas

    To their credit, plenty of left-leaning critics are ripping this adaptation for the same reasons.

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    George.Skinner

    Whenever a show runner decides to take a new spin on a property, there’s always a good chance a lot of changes become a gimmick rather than an interesting reinterpretation. If the new spin is what becomes featured, it’s usually a gimmick and not particularly interesting. If it’s a political virtue signal, it’ll get applauded by the target audience and leave the rest indifferent or worse.

    Ron D Moore’s BSG remake is probably the best case: the dark, gritty tone was a logical outgrowth of the premise of a goofy ‘70s TV series. Changing the character Starbuck to a woman made the character more interesting with more depth.

    Less good would be the recent reboot of “Anne of Green Gables”. One of the most appealing points of the books was the optimism and positive characters. A dark, gritty reboot was just kind of weird. It got applause from predictable corners, but never captured the global audience like the books or the ‘80s TV version.

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      Aylene Wright

      Regarding Anne of Green Gables:

      I recall an interesting sequel movie to the 80s series on PBS, that showed a middle aged Anne tracing back her life PRE Green Gables. I thought it was about 2.5 to 3 stars, as I really thought Adult Anne was miscast, but the young actress playing Preadolescent Anne was wonderful. I think it did a better job of adding a slightly edgier twist to the original material, as it's already canon that Anne was basically treated like a servant by her prior foster families.

      And there are actually other LM Montgomery works in the same Prince Edward Island setting that are much darker, that I think were better suited for a gritty interpretation. Ironically, LMM herself struggled in a loveless marriage to a husband who was probably clinically depressed, and may even have died by suicide. There's a recurring motif in her works of an old maid or unhappily married woman longing for her lost first love; this is quite autobiographical, one of her suitors died of influenza and she apparently never got over him.

      Even in the original Anne book series, there's a really disturbing episode of Anne having a neighbor trapped in an unhappy marriage with an abusive husband, who came back from a sea voyage brain injured. The husband eventually has brain surgery, and recovers his wits, and it turns out he's not actually the man she married, but his relative who looks just like him, and who tells Anne's friend that her actual husband died at sea. This frees her to marry her true love.

      So I don't think a gritty interpretation of AoGG was totally the mark. Just not well executed.

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    Karmol

    honestly, i fully do not understand the hate. (especially since SO much of the criticism I've seen online comes from people who clearly have not seen the show - comments that call Velma black [she's Indian] and miss out on the fact that shaggy is black).

    To answer the question in the headline (Who is ‘Velma’ For?): HBO knows what it's doing ("Despite the backlash, the Velma premiere made the Scooby Doo spin-off HBO Max's most-watched animated original show in the history of the platform." https://screenrant.com/velma-premiere-most-watched-animated-original-show-hbo/). HBO knows its audience, HBO knows its demographics. Is HBO not supposed to act like a capitalistic company and give its audience what it wants because a conservative author at The Dispatch (who isn't the target demographic) doesn't like the humor? HBO doesn't care about Rotten Tomatoes ratings (which are clearly being hate bombed), HBO doesn't care about all these think pieces, all they care about is the number of people that watch and continue to pay for HBO memberships.

    but maybe i'm also the target demographic? I'm 32, I've lived most of my adult life in cities, i have lots of family and friends who are queer & multi-racial, I love meta-analysis of tv, etc. I watched scooby doo re-runs occasionally before school, but I only watched it because we didn't have cable - i.e. I'm familiar with the IP, but I would have rather watched another kids cartoon if it were available.

    Let's also be perfectly honest here - if a Scooby Doo remake was produced that had the exact same writing/style/humor, but didn't have race-swapped characters or bisexual characters, there would not be nearly as many click-bait headlines about how bad this show is (seriously, look in the comments sections on social media - most of the interactions are from people who clearly hadn't heard about the show before seeing a thumbnail picture of a non-white Velma).

    My generation loves the "what's the background? how did we get here?" of it all - see House of the Dragon (I think they're going to find a dog at some point, that will probably be the big reveal at the end of the season). There's a funny re-imagining in Velma where Shaggy is extremely anti-drug, compared to the pop-image conception of him as a stoner in the regular show.

    And it would be WEIRD for a show this day and age to have 6 white straight people hanging out - that certainly doesn't look like my friend groups. This isn't woke nonsense, this is reality. My friend groups are diverse in terms of sexuality and race. And this show reflects my high school experience! My friends were coming to terms with their sexuality, there were conversations about privilege of race and wealth, National Honor Society kids were skipping lunch to smoke weed, and you knew which of your friends were dealing drugs to raise some cash (I grew up in conservative rural pennsylvania, in case anyone gets the wrong idea here).

    Also, the voice actors are clearly having a great time. It's fun to hear Sam Richardson get to play with a bit more range on an HBO show outside of Veep, and Glenn Howerton is always a delight as a self-involved narcissist.

    So long story show - this show might not be for you! And that's ok. Because I'm enjoying it, I'm looking forward to the next episode. And so are lots of other people. And doesn't that mean that the free market is winning?

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      The Bell Tower

      “Is HBO not supposed to act like a capitalistic company and give its audience what it wants because a conservative author at The Dispatch (who isn't the target demographic) doesn't like the humor?”

      They are but nobody has to like the result. Markets and democracy are cousins in that they sometimes produce crap. The good part about capitalism is that you can usually ignore the junk you don’t like. Democracy, not so much.

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    Miningengine

    I didn’t make it through the first episode. I consider myself a social liberal, but found myself turning to my 20-year-old and asking, “Is this really how you guys talk?!” Every plot point seemed to have a social cause attached to it. It was awful.

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    Collin

    The original Scooby Doo had a rationalist bent to it. A reimagining of the series and/or characters could lean into that. There are ways to rethink the show. Velma doesn’t seem to do a very good job of that.

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    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    And Mindy Kahling would have gotten away with this show if it hadn't been for you meddlin' kids!

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    1. Clark.Monson

      Haha. Somebody had to say it. Well done.

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  10. Goatprairie

    Hey, how about a show with Archie and Jughead as two dope dealers. Veronica and Betty are strippers and prostitutes. Maybe Mr. Wetherbee can be a pedophile or secret serial killer. Wouldn't that be a great new show?

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      DougCLE

      Sorry, have you seen “Riverdale”?

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      1. Goatprairie

        No, I haven't read any Archie comics for over fifty years. Tell me about Riverdale.

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          DougCLE

          Archie comics based supernatural horror TV series, with killers, drug dealers, gangs, and lots of heavily sexualized teen drama… maybe not quite what you imagined but definitely getting there. CW show (of course).

          Link below gives the full scoop if you’re interested, but I wouldn’t bother. I was just making the point that there’s nothing you can imagine that’s so bad that today’s screenwriters won’t say, “Dude, hold my beer…”

          https://youtu.be/Ld4-f-wwP_E

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            Aylene Wright

            I actually considered watching Riverdale out of nostalgia, but then read a synopsis about one episode featuring Archie having an affair with Ms Grundy. 😬

            Now to be fair she is much younger in the TV version than the comics, but I guess teen TV drama writers haven't gotten the memo that yes, teen boys actually CAN be sexually abused by adult women. I remember the same plot point in Dawson's Creek, and even the Psycho prequel series on AMC (although to be fair, Young Norman then kills the teacher who seduced him in a psychotic rage, so it's not actually endorsing female teachers sexually abusing their male students. And of course Norman being abused by his Mother was already "canon" per one of the movies.)

            All that being said, even the comics are very different now from how they were in the last century. One special edition involved a future adult Archie dying heroically defending his gay friend, who has grown up to be a politician, from a presumably homophobic assassin.

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