Velma (2023) – Review

With this series, HBO Max attempts to capture the adult edge that made their Harley Quinn series so popular but right out of the gate they had to deal with angry Scooby-Doo fans who were already pissed that HBO had cancelled the animated movie Scooby-Doo! Holiday Haunt, and instead, were launching a new series that would not include the cowardly canine at all, something even a non-fan would expect to find in a show featuring the Scooby gang and overcoming that would be a tough hill to climb, sadly, the writers of this show quickly succumbed to altitude sickness.

It should be noted that the absence of Scooby-Doo was not due to any moronic judgement by the show’s writers but due to the fact that this series was going to be adult-orientated so the studio mandated that Scooby himself would never appear.  Now, if a lack of Scooby-Doo had been the only problem with this series we’d be laughing, unfortunately, this thing was a tonal mess from frame one and went from “cleverly” mocking of standard television tropes to lame tired jokes that wouldn’t get a tween to laugh, all within the span of the first few minutes of the very first episode. It’s clear from the beginning that the writers of this show must have thought gore and “edgy humour" automatically equalled appealing to an adult audience, who I think was their target demographic but that's just me guessing, and that telling a compelling story with good characters wasn’t all that important. Having watched the first season of this show it’s safe to assume that writers must have suffered massive brain injuries to think anything that followed was funny.

 

I bet the writers could really relate to the missing brain plot element.

So what exactly is this show about? This series is to be taken as a prequel to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! because it works towards answering the question “How did the Scooby gang get together to solve mysteries?” a question not needed answering if you’ve watched the series A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, but as there has never been any type of solid continuity between runs of Scooby-Doo this was not necessarily a bad thing, on the other hand, turning most of the cast into insufferable unlikable characters was, in fact, a very bad thing. The plot for season one deals with the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Velma’s mother, Diya Dinkley (Sarayu Blu), who everyone believes simply ran off to parts unknown, everyone except Velma (Mindy Kaling) who believes that she was abducted and will stop at nothing to find the truth, no matter who gets hurt in the process. Her search for her missing mother is greatly hampered by crippling guilt-based hallucinations that bring her to her knees whenever she starts to question the elements involved with her mother’s disappearance.

 

At least her hallucinations were visually interesting if not the plot.

Velma's search for her missing mother runs into a few speed bumps along the way; several local teenage girls are murdered and found with their brains missing and while this mystery does eventually tie in with the disappearance of Velma’s mother it’s not all that compelling and the few suspects the show feeds us are thin at best and lame at worst, and when the final unmasking occurs it’s almost an anti-climax because the writers have failed to make us care about anyone in this town. Could the killer be Shaggy’s guidance counsellor father? Probably not, but the writers will toss in some damning evidence to make us think so and then quickly toss that aside as they move on to the next piece of crude humour or lazy trope to run into the ground. The show even tries to make Fred Jones (Glenn Howerton) a suspect but even the writers of this show weren’t going to go so as far as to make one of the Scooby gang an actual killer.

 

He’s not the killer but the writers do their best to make us wish he was dead.

It should also be noted that this really isn’t a mystery show, despite all the bizarre and quirky things the writers toss into this blender of a show, which was clearly trying to be an animated version of Twin Peaks, but the mystery itself isn’t the real focus of the show, instead, a "love quadrangle" between the founding members of Mystery Incorporated seems to be the central focus. First, we have Norville “Shaggy” Rogers (Sam Richardson) and his unrequited love for Velma, despite the fact that she treats him like a doormat, then we have her mad crush on Fred Jones despite him being an insane man-baby, and finally, she is soon seen lip-locking with Daphne Blake (Constance Wu) to bring up that question of Velma’s sexuality as if that part of her character is now the most important part. Clearly, the writers of this show saw the positive feedback on the HBO MAX series Harley Quinn and thought they’d just copy and paste some of those elements here.

 

Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy this is not.

The character of Velma Dinkley has been queer-coded since pretty much her inception and with her relationship with Hotdog Water in the series Mystery Incorporated, and her out-of-the-closet crush on Coco Diablo in Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo, this was certainly no shocking revelation, and this isn't to say and I love to see her in a relationship with Daphne, just not this Velma as this incarnation is such a narcissistic asshat that she doesn’t deserve to be happily ever after with anyone. As bodies start to pile up and we learn disturbing backstories about all of our main cast the central mystery unfolds at a snail's pace – this should have been a movie as the mystery we are given is unsustainable over ten episodes – and despite every attempt to make this a dark meta take on the Scooby gang it fails on pretty much every level.

 

I'll admit, we do need more shows that have brains in jars.

Stray Observations:

• HBO wanted us to know right off the hop that "This isn’t “Your dad’s Scooby-Doo” by having the first episode opening with two cockroaches humping, clearly, subtly was not on the writers’ menu.
• I did appreciate the turning of “Danger Prone Daphne” on its head by making her embrace the name, with it now symbolizing her love of danger and not her penchant for getting gagged and tied up.
• Daphne’s dad informs her that “Crystals are a hoax, like internships” which is one of the few observational jokes that actually worked in this show, but who wants to bet that HBO has an internship program?
• There’s a throw-away line about Velma having gone through a “Flat Earth Phase” which is a rather bizarre character trait to give to the most logical member of Mystery Incorporated.
• We get the classic chase through multiple doors until Fred screams out “Stop, going through doors like this, it is physically impossible” before realizing they're in some sort of funhouse.  This actually made me chuckle, which goes to prove that an infinite amount monkeys are bound to make one thing work.
• We eventually learn that Daphne’s real parents are criminals who run an underground crystal smuggling ring, that they dress up like Captain Caveman is another case of the writers going “Hey, remember that show?” as if that equals funny.

 

Pop cultural references are the lazy man’s comedy.

The key problem with this show wasn’t the over-the-top shenanigans of Velma, Daphne, Shaggy and Fred, if you watch the series Be Cool, Scooby-Doo you can see how this can be pulled off to great effect, the problem actually stems from the fact that the writers of this show appear to have no love whatsoever for these classic characters, this wasn’t a case of deconstructing tropes, which can be funny if done properly, it was straightforward character assassination done in the most mean-spirited manner possible, and what is fun about that? It’s obvious that the creators of this show were all about creating a show that was all about “subversion” and being all “meta” but while those elements can lead to an interesting series but Velma actually fell victim to the very tropes it was trying to mock. This is not to say every attempt at humour failed but I’d say a good eighty percent of the jokes hit the floor with a resounding thud, and while the racial-blind casting and voice acting was not an issue for me – who could oppose the idea of a Daphne being a hot redheaded Asian American, certainly not me – however, I did take issue with how they were all treated in this brutal incarnation.

 

“Hey guys, let’s make Velma into a narcissistic version of Daria, wouldn’t that be great?”

The big question here is “Who exactly was this show for?” because it’s not for fans of Scooby-Doo, who will hate it for what it did to their favourite characters, nor is it for older audience members who may enjoy a darker take on the genre because the writers actually went out of their way to insult adults who watch cartoons, and the result is a show that now consists mostly of hate-watchers, sadly, that demographic was apparently large enough to greenlight a second season.