Everything you've heard is true - this is vile trash made by hateful people. It actually plays out like an OTT satire of the recent glut of woke reboots ("Make this classic character black! Make that classic character gay! Mock the straight white male at every opportunity!"), only this isn't a goof - it actually means every bitter, spiteful thing it says, none of which are actually funny. A failure on every possible level. Of course it's getting a second season.

"Velma" represents unadulterated misunderstanding and hatred towards animation, adult animation, coherent storytelling and Scooby Doo. The art style is great but that's the only good thing about it. Mindy Kaling's anger and frustration drips through the show, the political correctness and non stop pointing to who's black or white, the over the top of the top meta aspects and the lack of actual stories with or without mysteries, ghosts and monsters, makes this the first real train wreck of 2023.

The wall to wall backlash and brutal reception actually made me check the pilot out myself for the sake of morbid curiosity. Does that make me a sucker? Almost certainly.

Woof. Is what Scoob said reading the script, so he didn’t bother and left his franchise to go star in indie dramas for A24. But really, it’s almost remarkable how bad and lazy the humor is, and they had to somehow spritz the lazy and bad with an unbottomingly vile and mean tone. Every joke and plot twist is unredeemably bitter and hateful. It seems laced in its own sense of faux-virtue to the point where it’s defined by narcissistic victim-baiting, and not by, jinkies, solving mysteries.

Apparently racism is not racism if it's directed at white people, sexism is not sexism when it's directed at men, and there actually exists a thing called heterophobia. No other way to describe this vile thing. The only thing I'm talking with me after watching this is wishing us humans weren't such assholes. And for this post-creativity era to finally end so I can watch something decent that was written by talented people.

Every word Velma says is like a dagger of Benadryl

I don't think it's quite as terrible as so many people have said, but it's just unremarkable. There are moments here and there that are fun, and I think some of the differences from the usual Scooby stories make the show more interesting, but the story itself here just isn't that great overall, and it's not quite funny enough to make up for that either.

What makes Velma obnoxious is that it has a pretentious conceit of self-awareness on being above conventional tropes (assuming they don't just make those up) while lacking the self-awareness to realize they still play these tropes straight, further worsen by pretending their characters are supposed to be likable. It's also painfully unfunny, where most jokes rely on a seething dislike for whatever Velma finds disgust in and the hyperbole lacks the logic to justify its punchline.

I will never understand why people make remakes of franchises they clearly hate.

2 Episodes & a lot of controversy; Velma is a middling show. A few amusing jokes, a few bad ones and plenty of inane dialogue. It's an interesting take on the Mystery Gang, though admittedly not a faithful one. Thematically, Velma seems more a criticism of 4th/5th wave feminism than a homage to it. After watching the 2nd season, I'm fully on board with this show. It's definitely subversive with regards to the personalities of the younger versions of the characters we know, but the plot is fun.