Mindy Kaling and HBO Max’s Scooby-Doo Reboot ‘Velma’ Under Fire for Sexualizing Teens and Just Plain Being Unfunny

When it was first announced that Mindy Kaling would be creating a Scooby-Doo spinoff series called Velma, the biggest buzz around the show was that the titular character, voiced by Kaling herself, would be South Asian. In reaction to racist trolls decrying her vision, Kaling brushed off the hate, saying, “Hopefully you noticed my Velma is South Asian. If people freak out about that, I don’t care.”

Now that the show is out, it seems that it’s not Velma’s character who is getting flack. Instead, it’s just that the show has taken a beloved group of characters and rendered them unlikable. In Decider’s review of the series, Brittany Vincent writes, “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.”

She adds, “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.”

But we’re not alone in wondering why the series has gone in the direction it did. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, the show has a dismally low 8% audience approval rating, with the majority of audience reviewers showing their disappointment that the series holds little reverence or relation to its source material.

“Horrible take on a beloved character, missing all the points on how the original show is fun and entertaining,” one user wrote, while another said, “If your goal is to stray as far as possible from the original work of art why even use the same IP?”

The new series, which is rated TV-MA, also features a lot of adult themes and some sexuality, which means it’s not geared toward kids like the original. One scene features a locker room shower full of high school girls, all naked save for some strategically-placed suds, which has drawn criticism for sexualizing teens and making jokes that are just, for lack of a better word, “cringe.”

One such joke uses #MeToo as a punchline and feels especially weird for a show that otherwise appears to want to embrace diversity and feminism.

All this controversy and only two of the show’s episodes have come out! But seeing as it’s on HBO, we’ll be on the edge of our seat waiting for the moment it will inevitably be pulled from the content library.

New episodes of Velma premiere Thursdays on HBO Max.