In an era of ceaseless friction and rampant divide, Charlie Grandy and Mindy Kaling have stepped up with an ambitious, new project to unite the world in a cry of collective ire. Velma, made for Warner Bros. Discovery’s on-demand streaming service HBO Max… or at least, that is what I hope they were going for because the television series pretty much fails to achieve anything else.
Its producers have called it a “love letter” to the original creation of Hanna-Barbera. So, with Valentine’s Day approaching us in less than a week, let me just take the time to thank my lucky stars as I am not romantically courting any of them because I really do not wish to find anthrax in my mail.
Currently boasting an IMDb rating of 1.4/10 and an audience score of 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, Velma has certainly endeared no audiences, whether it be the nostalgia crowd from the age of Scooby-Doo’s heyday or the younger generations whom the show tries in abysmal fashion to cater to. Therein lies the first of many clues which will help us solve the (non-)mystery of Velma’s failure…
Velma Is A Lazy Attempt At Reinvention
Aspiring to bring nothing fresh to the table and break no novel ground, Velma is nothing more than a caricature of the modern progressive movement. Appropriating numerous of its talking points with none of the tact and nuance required to explore them meaningfully. Reducing them to a punchline repeated over and over again without any setup or payoff. Instead, we have the writers of the show poking fun at their own ineptitude by laughing off the silliness via inane meta-commentary rather than making the effort to redress their shortcomings while totally being conscious of them.
None of the characters retains any semblance of their prime variants beyond their outfits and names. In other words, these are not Velma and her friends of an alternate world. They are an assemblage of completely different people who just happen to somewhat look and be called the same.
The fact we are expected to watch it and cherish it on that basis alone unveils the next clue in our investigation of the (non-)mystery of Velma’s failure …
Velma Is Entitled
HBO has been touting Velma as the number-one animated series on their streaming platform. What they have conveniently forgotten to mention, however, is that it is the only animated series on their streaming platform at the moment. Because, last summer, they went on a culling spree to delete all the content they owned from Cartoon Network Studios to cut expenses. There is a saying in our native tongue about scoring a goal across an empty field and this is a brazen case of that. And yet, the agents behind Velma have been celebrating the feat as an earned victory because they feel they deserve the accolade.
Why though? Well, envision a student who believes they deserve an A for penning an essay against terrorism. Written with poor grammar and several spelling errors. And then brazenly justifies it by saying, “If you give me a C, then surely it must mean you are for terrorism and not that I have made any mistakes in presenting my arguments.”
Velma operates under the presumption that it must be lauded for the agendas it pushes despite pushing them with all the adequacy of a paper condom. It is a shallow critique of various social issues, soliciting appreciation for merely referencing them. Now, you might say such was by design as those topics are too serious to be appraised in depth by a comedy to which I shall retort with the question – “What comedy?” Because…
Velma Is Offensively Unfunny
Ah, yes, the final clue that unravels the (non-)mystery of Velma’s failure! On its preview page, Velma is tagged as a comedy horror. An apt label for a show that strikes horror in the hearts of its viewers. As they are subjected to witness its grotesque murder of comedy until they are left cackling maniacally. At the realization, their life is a cosmic joke that was wasted upon this atrocity.
Seemingly the only sense of amusement to be reaped over its runtime was by its developers pointing and sniggering at us through the fourth wall they shattered to smithereens via hurling a barrage of derivative, self-gratifying quips and gags they spun out of a broken record. I sincerely hope you lot had a ball because we sure as hell did not!
Exhibiting an embarrassing lack of wit and – paradoxically for a “deconstruction” – self-awareness, Velma is a joyless jaunt through a wasteland of irreverent incompetence whose only proximity to eliciting laughter comes from learning someone thought it deserves another season; then again, ascribing the attribute of thought to any entity involved in conceiving the farce at issue is giving them far too much credit.
Normally, I would recommend you watch it and formulate your own opinion. However, in this instance, I am certain that would constitute a crime against humanity and an insult to the readers of Deshi Geek. Minus five stars! Go watch a rerun of South Park instead.
