Velma is an American adult animated mystery comedy television series featuring characters from the Scooby-Doo franchise. Created by Charlie Grandy for HBO Max, it stars executive producer Mindy Kaling as the voice of Velma, with Sam Richardson, Constance Wu, and Glenn Howerton in supporting roles. Grandy also serves as the showrunner of the series. It revolves around Velma Dinkley and the other human members of Mystery Inc. before their official formation, making it the first television series in the franchise to not feature the character Scooby-Doo.
The series premiered on January 12, 2023. A second season was released on April 25, 2024, with a Halloween special premiering on October 3 of the same year. In October 2024, the series was canceled after two seasons, which was confirmed 6 days after the release of the Halloween special.
While the series was met with mixed reviews from critics, it received overwhelmingly negative reviews from audiences.
The series serves as an alternate universe origin story for Mystery Inc., pitched as a "love quadrangle" between them. It primarily focuses on Velma Dinkley as she tries to solve a mystery regarding the disappearance of her mother, as well as the murders of local teenage girls.
Credits adapted from Behind The Voice Actors.
The series was first announced by HBO Max, on February 10, 2021, alongside the reboot of Clone High. On July 11, 2022, the trademark for the series was listed as abandoned, only for HBO Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys to confirm the series to still be in production in an August memo. Some of the characters are notably raceswapped. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mindy Kaling explains that, "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." Unlike most Scooby-Doo incarnations, this series does not feature Scooby-Doo himself due to the studio blocking access to the character, combined with the crew struggling to come up with an adult take on him. Matthew Lillard, the current voice of Shaggy Rogers in most Scooby-Doo media, expressed his support for the cast of Velma as opposed to his disappointment of not being cast in Scoob!.
A voice cast was revealed, alongside the release of a teaser trailer on October 6, 2022. That same day, the series was previewed at New York Comic Con. The first two episodes of Velma were released on January 12, 2023, on HBO Max, with the rest of the episodes being released in weekly pairs until February 9, 2023. Notably, the series broke HBO Max's record for the biggest premiere day of an original animated show. The second season was released on April 25, 2024. A Halloween special was released on October 3, 2024. On October 8, 2024, a background artist on the show wrote in a deleted Instagram post that the series was canceled. The next day, (HBO) Max confirmed the series' cancelation.
Velma received mixed reviews from critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 39% approval rating based on 38 critics' reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "Jinkies! This radical reworking of the beloved Mystery Team has plenty of attitude and style, but it doesn't have the first clue for how to turn its clever subversion into engaging fun." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 54 out of 100 based on 17 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
Saloni Gajjar of The A.V. Club gave the show a positive review, praising most of the humor, characterization, storytelling, voice cast, and creative liberties, but stating that sometimes the show falls victim to the tropes it mocks. She concluded the review by saying, "This isn't the Velma we're used to, but it's the Velma we deserve to enjoy today." Darren Franich of Entertainment Weekly was far more negative and gave the show a C, describing it as a "self-aware slog" and "so extra it's minus". He criticized the strong emphasis on pop-culture references and meta humor, and how they tend to bury the few bright spots. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it two out of four stars and stated that, "at times the humor is smart and spot-on, but it quickly becomes exhausting. It's as if a team of very clever scribes gathered in a writers' room and recorded everything they said â and then shoehorned all of it into the series."
Liz Shannon Miller of Consequence criticized the show's unbalanced tone, lack of focus, absence of Scooby-Doo, and overstuffed narrative. She also stated the series "feels a bit PG in comparison to other adult animation currently in the works". Conversely, Miller praised the voice acting as well as some of the gags, ending the review by hoping for a second season to iron out its flaws, having noted the show takes a "the first season is really the pilot episode" approach. In a mixed critique, Angie Han of The Hollywood Reporter praised the "thoughtful, emotionally honest" portrayal of Velma herself, but made note of how the show loves to poke fun at televised tropes, yet "seems somewhat less sure of what it has to offer in their stead". She stated how the series' "insistence that it's not like other shows grows thin" and criticized how the cast feels more like "joke machines" than individual characters.
Writing for IGN, Brittany Vincent criticized the series' portrayal of its title character, comparing her to "a biting, hateful version of Daria without the character growth", stating this aspect of the show holds it back from being what it strives to be. She did, however, praise the "side-splitting" comedy and the portrayals of Daphne and Fred, concluding that, "ironically, the series would be exponentially better without its namesake â or at least [with] a version of her with a bit more character growth." Paste Magazine's Rendy Jones gave the series a 5.8 out of 10, praising the art direction and voice performances, but describing the writing as "constantly at war with itself". They also compared it unfavorably to Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, which they deemed similar in intentions but superior in execution. Joshua Alston of Variety wrote the show is "irreverent to a fault", extolling most of the humor but stating it could belong to any other comedy series. He felt the Mystery Inc. gang was "really unpleasant".
Audience reception to Velma has been overwhelmingly negative. It became one of the lowest-rated television shows on IMDb, receiving similar low scores from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes and Google.
Asyia Iftikhar of PinkNews wrote that the show had been "accused of perpetuating stereotypes against South Asian women, criticised for poor attempts at self-aware comedy and slammed for losing the essence of what people love about the Scooby Doo gang". Brahmjot Kaur of NBC News wrote that the accusations of stereotypes had been rebutted by some who noted characters in other television shows invented by Kaling shared similar personality traits to the titular protagonist, while citing Kaling's past influences. Wireds Amos Barshad wrote that while there were likely still reactions of a racist and homophobic nature targeting the show, the main complaints were for it addressing diversity issues in a "flat, one-note manner", and that the "flippant" portrayal of Velma's sexuality had divided fans. However, when discussing the issue of racial stereotyping in Velma, Lakshmi Srinivas, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of Massachusetts, felt that Kaling was "being held to unfair standards as one of the only representations of South Asian women in the industry".
After the series' release and subsequent negative response, in an interview with Emmy Magazine, series creator Charlie Grandy defended the series. He recalled numerous positive experiences working with Kaling while also addressing the changes made to the physical appearances of the main characters. He was reported saying:<blockquote>"None of these characters are rooted to being white. We were worried about going to Warner Bros. and asking them to do it, but they said, 'Do it. It's time! Just make sure it's funny and good!'"</blockquote>Velma was later ranked by several publications as one of the worst television series of 2023.
In March 2023, a Velma-focused Scooby-Doo cosmic horror fan film entitled Velma Meets the Original Velma, produced by Avocado Animations, went viral.