Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Velma’ on HBO Max, A Cynical Take on Scooby-Doo That Could Do With 100% Less Velma

In the Scooby-Doo universe, Velma has typically been viewed as a “sidekick” character who, despite solving most of the mysteries her merry band of teens stumbles into. Velma, now on HBO Max, is an adult-oriented series that puts the titular heroine front and center, for better or worse. It also surrounds her with new spins on old characters that lack the creativity or the traits the originals possessed.

While it has its share of legitimately humorous moments, it completely and utterly fails at establishing a worthwhile adult adaptation of Scooby-Doo and instead twists familiar characters into caricatures of themselves, while Mindy Kaling (who voices Velma and executive produces the series) essentially cosplays as the bespectacled teen by bringing her acerbic brand of humor to the forefront. That is to say: Jinkies. It’s not very good.

VELMA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a shot of Velma’s iconic orange turtleneck before the camera pans over to a corkboard filled with note cards and theories connecting different people to different crimes.

The Gist: Velma Dinkley is your average teenager with a relatively normal life. She loves judging others, wearing turtlenecks, and solving mysteries. She lives with her father and his new girlfriend, and has been struggling with her mother having left the family when she was a young girl.

While going into the girls’ locker room to scare the “hot girls” (for some reason), Velma finds something terrifying is going on at her school, Crystal Cove High: said hot girls are being murdered, one by one. When she finds one stuffed into a locker, she’s immediately blamed for the killing, given her shady behavior moments before.

To clear her name, Velma agrees to solve the murder. She’s great at solving mysteries, so all she has to do is figure this one out, right? There’s just one problem: she has dizzying, terrifying hallucinations when she even thinks about doing such.

That’s why she has to rely on her best friend Norville Rogers (Sam Richardson) and her ex-best friend Daphne Blake (Constance Wu) to figure out what’s actually going on. And what about rich kid Fred Jones (Glenn Howerton)? He isn’t committing the string of murders, is he?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Comparisons can be made to DC’s adult-oriented Harley Quinn animated series, except that show is actually funny and uses its raunchy nature to its advantage. There’s also the fact that many of the characters look like Hank Venture from The Venture Bros., which is not an intentional homage, so The Venture Bros., I guess? ‘Cause you sure aren’t comparing this series to any classic Scoob.

Our Take: Velma is the reboot no one asked for and the reimagining of the super-sleuth no one found necessary. It’s difficult to understand why anyone saw fit to revamp the heroine herself and replace her kindness, intelligence, and helpful personality (with a dose of adorable shyness) with this snark machine who can barely stand herself as it is, let alone anyone around her.

Velma herself is a hateful character who contributes little more than sarcastic quips just about every time she’s onscreen. It’s genuinely difficult to care about her plight or her desire to figure out what really happened to her mother because she makes it so hard to do so. Shaggy has been transformed into “Norville” (his real name), a vlogger who records mukbangs and obsesses over Velma in ways that can only be described as pathetic.

Daphne Blake is one of the only likable characters, a mean girl who has feelings for Velma which appear to go both ways, and Fred Jones is an infantile tyrant of a rich kid who doesn’t care about anything but himself, played to perfection by Glenn Howerton. The changes to the classic Scooby cast mostly come off as bland and weird, but at least Daphne and Fred aren’t saddled with the worst of it.

Velma and Norville drag the show down to an almost unwatchable level. Luckily there are some absolutely side-splitting jokes, but they are few and far between, and they don’t come from Velma. If she has anything to contribute, it’s sarcasm about someone’s looks, personality, a pop culture reference, or blah blah something something fighting the patriarchy, a tired old tune this Velma who doesn’t even seem to understand feminism certainly isn’t doing.

Sex and Skin: A gym locker room full of teenage girls can be seen at the very beginning of the episode may make viewers uncomfortable, for one thing. The rest of the show is filled with sexual references and jokes, the occasional nude body, and other similar content involving Velma and her friends, which is kind of weird to have to write when you think about it.

Parting Shot: Velma and Norville regroup at Velma’s home before Velma notices a group of roaches crawling around one of the trash cans behind the house. Norville opens the lid to the trash can to reveal the dead body of one of her schoolmates.

Sleeper Star: Though Fred is technically a main character, he’s not in every single scene. That doesn’t keep Glenn Howerton from making him an absolute scene-stealer whenever Fred does get some screen time, though. He’s easily the funniest person in the entire series, with Howerton infusing Fred with the kind of bizarre, psychotic behavior that’s likely always been there in the character, bubbling just beneath the surface.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I’ve decided to finally share the bone-chilling events that drove me to assemble the greatest team of spooky mystery solvers ever,” Velma proclaims at the beginning of the episode. She takes credit for bringing all of Mystery, Inc. together, though there’s no Scooby in this series.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While there are some funny gags peppered throughout Velma, it’s bogged down by its lead. It’s unfortunate that Mindy Kaling saw fit to treat Velma as her self-insert character without retaining any of the qualities that made the character likable in the first place. This so-called origin story is off to a horrible start, and the few cheap laughs that you’ll find in the first episode don’t necessarily make it worth hanging around for 10 long, awful installments.

Brittany Vincent has been covering video games and tech for over a decade for publications like G4, Popular Science, Playboy, Variety, IGN, GamesRadar, Polygon, Kotaku, Maxim, GameSpot, and more. When she’s not writing or gaming, she’s collecting retro consoles and tech. Follow her on Twitter: @MolotovCupcake.