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Velma is reportedly getting a second season. According to new listings, HBO Max has greenlit season 2 of the spin-off of the Scooby-Doo franchise. This update has left fans bewildered since the animated comedy has received only hate ever since it premiered on January 12, 2023.
Notably, the first two episodes of the animated series opened to mostly negative reviews, with the show clocking a dismal 1.6 rating on IMDb based on 12,000 votes. The news of the renewal came even before the third and fourth episodes, which are slated for release on January 19, 2023. This upset fans even more.
The synopsis, according to HBO Max, is:
“Velma is an adult animated comedy series telling the origin story of Velma Dinkley, the unsung and underappreciated brains of the Scooby-Doo Mystery Inc. gang. An original and humorous spin that unmasks the complex and colorful past of one of America’s most beloved mystery solvers.”
Developed by Charlie Grandy, the show features the voices of animation debutante Mindy Kaling (also a co-executive producer), Glenn Howerton, Sam Richardson, and Constance Wu. Kaling voices the titular character.
Velma fails to impress viewers, faces severe criticism on Twitter
As per a recent listing on Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR), the “universal unique identifier system for movie and television assets,” Warner Bros is working on a second season of the show. The new edition will have 11 episodes, unlike season 1, which has 10.
As soon as the news became public, shocked fans took to Twitter to express their discontent.
One particular user highlighted how season 2 was planned in 2022, so the current reception and “viewing measures have nothing to do with this.”
Show initially came to notice for its race-swapped characters
Velma was launched way back in 2021 and battled a lull for more than a year.
In August 2022, HBO Chief Content Officer Casey confirmed the series was in production and at the New York Comic Con held in October 2022, it got a preview. The series managed to nudge viewers with its race-swapped characters.
Velma Dinkley, Norville "Shaggy" Rogers, and Daphne Blake were mostly white in the original comics. But in the adult animated mystery TV series, Dinkley is Indian, Shaggy is Black, and Blake is a lesbian Asian. Only the fourth piece in this fan-favorite quartet, Fred Jones, has remained unchanged.
At the show’s preview at Comic Con last year, Mindy Kaling told EW that Marvel’s 2018 animated superhero film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse “inspired” her to go for non-white characters.
She added:
“The essence of Velma is not necessarily tied to her whiteness. And I identify so much as her character, and I think so many people do, so it's like, yeah, let's make her Indian in this series.”
However, fans were not convinced. One user called Kaling “the worst thing to happen to Indians since the British.”
Moreover, even before the show premiered, The Office star’s comments at Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront presentation, held in April 2022, angered fans. At the time, Kaling said:
“Hopefully, you noticed my Velma is South Asian, if people freak out about that I don't care.”
This aside, the other two reasons why the show didn’t sit well with the fans were bland humor and predictable plot.
The show didn’t just rile up viewers. Even critics disliked its over-usage of pop-culture references, meta humor, lack of focus, unbalanced tone, Scooby-Doo’s absence, and overstuffed narrative.
