HBO Max’s ‘Velma’ Is Getting Absolutely Savaged In Reviews And Online

Velma

HBO Max

Velma always seemed like a weird experiment, a re-imagining of Scooby Doo in adult animation format, where the danger is real and the jokes are dumber. It could have worked, but by all accounts it doesn’t. Not at all.

The first two episodes of Velma have arrived on HBO Max. They haven’t really impressed the critics, but the audience ratings? They are brutal.

Velma is currently sitting at a very poor 50% for HBO-Max from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and has only 9% out of hundreds of audience scores.

Velma

HBO Max

Before you jump in and say “well this is a review of people bombing the show because it made the cast more diverse” this is… one of the weirdest things here. Velma seems like she’s bothering both sides of her potential audience here. Sure, there will be regular people who hate the “diversity rep,” but if you watch the show yourself, it seems like they’re making fun of shows that do diversity broadcasts or social messages. It’s been alleged that what you might have assumed would be a more left-wing fan base for the show to accuse creator Mindy Kaling of actually making it a somewhat conservative project, as people cite past comments she’s made and stuff such as she liked JK Rowling’s recent tweets as evidence. of her personal views.

Most of all, it feels like the humor just doesn’t connect for any audience. The show feels like it’s trying to annoy anyone who watches it, and the Scooby Doo IP almost seems secondary to the whole concept. Scooby Doo has found great success over the years as a children’s cartoon and with live-action films, and while it’s possible that an adult animated version of the concept might have worked, this iteration seems to have wiped out the all possible audiences the wrong way. This is a show that has finally kissed Daphne and Velma goodbye, and yet its potential liberal audience is writing it off because of how antagonistic it all feels.

It’s a shame, because this really is a stellar cast here. Constance Wu, Sam Richardson, Glenn Howerton. And of course I’ve enjoyed Kaling’s work before, whether it’s on The Office, The Mindy Project, or most recently, Never Have I Ever. But Velma? Something went deeply wrong here, and it’s getting harder than any new show I’ve seen since The Witcher: Blood Origin on Netflix. Although even this climbed to a score of 13% of the audience eventually. Right now, Velma doesn’t really have anything else to compare it to in terms of how bad it’s scoring, and it can’t be blamed on a politically driven bombing campaign, since both sides dislike it for different reasons. What a strange situation.

Update (1/15): Time hasn’t improved this as more people have seen the show, which HBO now says is its most-watched Max original animated premiere ever (not that there’s much to compare it to , even Harley Quinn premiered in the DC Universe).

With nearly 3,000 reviews, Velma has a 7% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Velma has a user rating of 0.4/10 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 has hit the holy trinity: it’s actually being bombarded by right-wing viewers complaining about “woke” content. And yet unlike other series that do, left-leaning viewers aren’t finding the show defensible, and they’re giving it low marks as well. Not because of the “wake” content, but because it’s just…bad. And then you have the third pillar, the upset 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 set, based on the reviews I’m reading online.

Mindy Kaling has continued to draw ire online for Velma, with many citing her constant “self-insertion” in her series, with the recurring theme of an Indian girl desperate for white attention also in place in the shows. her other.

But it has also been mentioned that Charlie Grandy is actually credited as the creator of Velma. Grandy has been a frequent collaborator of Kaling’s and in the wake of the Velma affair, has been accused of nepotism, the son of a former Love Boat star and congressman, with his mother a Hollywood television writer. It’s gotten pretty personal with both of these, with many looking for explanations as to why Velma is so mean.

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