HBO MAX killed off the film BATGIRL, the TV shows MINX, WESTWORLD, RAISED BY WOLVES, LOVE LIFE, BATMAN: CAPED CRUSADER, MADE FOR LOVE, CLOSE ENOUGH . . . And so many more. But somehow they let VELMA air.
If there's a bigger waste of time and money than VELMA on TV, we're hard pressed to name it.
For those who aren't aware, the Velma of the title is the Velma who debuted back in 1969 on SCOOBY DOO WHERE ARE YOU back in 1969. And VELMA brings on like Shaggy, Fred and Daphne but leaves out Scooby making it like watching an old episode of WELCOME BACK, KOTTER filmed after John Travolta has left the series.
HBO MAX released (like bad gas?) two episodes last week and plans to release two a week until all ten episodes are released. And then?
It should be immediately dropped and forgotten.
Velma Daisy Dinkley has been many things over the years -- including Jewish and bi-sexual. On this show, Velma has been mid-dated and is now a lesbian and an Indian-American.
Mid-dated?
That's one of the biggest problems for the show, mid-dating.
Mindy Kalig. Boys and girls, many, many years ago she appeared on the cult series THE OFFICE and THE MINDY PROJECT. She seemed fresh then. She's gone stale now.
VELMA has Velma offering 'pop culture criticism' that might be of interest if this were the nineties or even the early aughts. Time has moved on, even if Mindy can't. At 43, she seems to think that what was going on when she was a child will pass for a current pop critique. It's as though she never saw 1996's SCREAM -- or, for that matter, 1993's SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE.
In one voice over after another, Mindy's Velma is belaboring tired points that were made decades ago. It's as if someone hacked into JEZEBEL yesterday and started posting the embarrassing doodles from the early '00s FEMINISTING.
There's also something very smutty about a show, a cartoon, that wants to call out sexism while also showing multiple women speaking naked in the shower as the camera objectifies them. And while butts are shown, boobs are ridiculously covered up with some sort of body wash that works like the whip cream on Chris Evans' pecs in NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE. It gets worse as a corpse is discovered and we've still got naked women -- including a poorly drawn Daphne. Can someone explain, by the way, if all the animation attention was supposed to go into drawing Velma and that's why the look of the other characters appear half-thought out?
Not much thought or care has been taken visualizing those characters or, for that matter, writing them.
Instead, we're supposed to focus on the character people call "Velma." But it's not "Velma." Velma's been around for 50 years, this isn't her.
If Mindy had created this show based on a new character, it probably would have worked better. Some are bothered that Velma is gay. That's not a concern for us. But we are bothered by how Mindy portrays Velma -- as though she's sporting a chip the size of Utah on her shoulder. And, jinkies, Velma is and has been many things but bitter was never one of them.