Everyone Hates HBO Max’s ‘Velma’

Reboots of beloved childhood films and television shows inevitably become a fierce battleground for the culture war, as adult content creators find new opportunities for performative outrage.

Usually, there’s a strict divide between progressives and “anti-woke” content creators, but HBO Max’s Velma has, somehow, united both camps; everyone, it seems, hates Velma.

Why?

Velma is a reboot of Scooby-Doo that doesn’t feature Scooby-Doo, and reimagines the Mystery Gang as a diverse group of teens with dramatically different personalities from the original characters.

Taking a new direction on an old story isn’t a bad idea in itself, but Velma is so far removed from Scooby-Doo that viewers have speculated that the show might have been conceived as an original concept that had a popular IP slapped onto it at some point during production.

This is just speculation, but such suspicions have become an increasingly common talking point among fans and critics recently, who have grown tired of watching reboots that don’t seem remotely connected to the source material, like Resident Evil, The Witcher, Halo, or Lightyear.

Facing an assembly line of content designed to invoke empty nostalgia, audiences seem to be becoming more cynical – and who could blame them?

Velma is also being criticized for its shallow sense of humor, which is extremely self-referential, and packed with snarky, pseudo-progressive one-liners that seem stolen from 2016 “girlboss” Twitter.

The show mocks Fred for being a white man and having a small penis (groundbreaking stuff), but also makes “edgelord” jokes about how #MeToo has neutered comedians.

The show seems to attempting to appeal to all sides of the political spectrum, and pleasing no one in the process; it’s as if the writers combined the one-note humor of Lilly Singh and Steven Crowder.

The show has sparked a frenzy of discourse, inspired parodies, and is currently rated 1.3 out of 10 on IMDb, and 57% on Rotten Tomatoes (with an audience score of 6%). People generally like Velma as a character, but they really, really hate HBO’s Velma.

Of course, anti-woke YouTube is having a field day with Velma, blaming the show’s poor reception on “wokeness gone too far,” but progressives are equally unhappy, calling out the show’s lazy sense of humor, and directing their ire at the show’s creator, Mindy Kaling, who is now being accused of being reactionary.

After watching Velma, however, the hate seems a tad overblown. It’s not particularly funny, clever or interesting; it’s just mediocre. And it’s only two episodes in, so it might get better … maybe?

The show seems to want to be Harley Quinn, which uses quirky humor and hyper-violence to tell fresh, funny stories about Gotham City, but Velma comes across as a limp imitation.

If Velma wasn’t a Scooby-Doo reboot, it would likely be ignored; right now, it is being discussed as though it is some kind of abomination; really, it’s just another lazy reboot, a bad take on a beloved character.

Perhaps viewers are beginning to reject the idea that every single franchise they ever enjoyed as children needs to be resurrected into something unrecognizable, and boring.