New Series Getting A Second Season Despite Fans Absolutely Hating It
The fan-hated Mindy Kaling series Velma is getting a second season at HBO.
Right now, it’s fair to say that the Mindy Kaling Velma show on HBO Max has quickly become one of the most despised shows ever made. Over on Rottentomatoes, the show has a low 55% critical score and an absolutely abysmal seven percent score from audiences. Despite this intense backlash, the Entertainment Identifier Registry shows that episodes for a second season of the controversial show are already in development.
Part of what makes the show divisive is that it doesn’t seem to understand its audience. Velma is a Mindy Kaling passion project, and considering that the show changed the ethnicity of three of the four familiar Scooby-Doo characters, the show seemed destined to garner a harsh reaction from rightwing audiences for being too “woke.” However, the show has also angered more progressive audiences for some of its bizarre humor, including when the titular Velma (voiced by Kaling herself) says that she is known to “spit truth without a filter, like every comedian before #MeToo.”
In fact, the show has seemingly gone out of its way to piss as many types of audiences off as possible. This includes most fans of the original Scooby-Doo franchise because of the wild decision to not include Scooby. Even if Velma was counting on a wave of feel-good nostalgia from audiences, a Scooby-Doo spinoff without Scooby-Doo just feels hollow.
That leads to perhaps the most common criticism of Velma: that, all things considered, this should have just been an original show instead of one using the familiar Scooby-Doo characters. After all, the show mostly focuses on the title character rather than the full ensemble cast, and it’s set when the characters are all in high school. Velma is the only one really focused on solving mysteries, Shaggy is now a character named Norville, Daphne is a drug dealer and the talking dog is nowhere to be seen, and it all adds up to this show not feeling much like the original property at all.
To make matters worse, when the show does try to lean into the Scooby-Doo universe, it does so in ham-handed ways such as making the lesbian romance between Velma and Daphne explicit (something that was already a tired joke when portrayed in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back over two decades ago). On top of that, many have compared the goal of this show (being a smart adult parody of old children’s cartoons) to The Venture Bros, but Velma really suffers by comparison. Not only is the writing anywhere close to the quality that we got from Team Venture, but that show already featured a whip-smart parody episode in which the Scooby Gang were actually famous serial killers (Fred was Ted Bundy, Shaggy was the Son of Sam, and so on).
In short, Velma is a hot mess of a show that has angered audiences in every corner of the political spectrum while also driving away fans of the original property. Given how much bad buzz the show has been getting, it’s possible that the second season in development may get scrapped. Then again, if audiences engage in enough ironic hate-watching of this show, then we might have to endure another entire season filled with jokes about Fred’s tiny penis.
