Alright, ready those tomatoes and warm up your pitching arm because I’ve got something to say: Max’s Velma series is fantastic. In a world where people have some grace and proper consideration for new things, loving the adult-oriented spinoff about the Scooby-Doo franchise’s devoted brainiac wouldn’t be such an outrageous take. But, much to my chagrin, we don’t live in that universe.
Most people actively despised the first season of Velma, and largely for the wrong reasons. Some critics deemed it uneven, having too many flat, throwaway punchlines. (Not an unfair opinion, I echoed something similar in my own review.) Others didn’t see the point at all, willfully misunderstanding the series’ clever subversion of audience expectations. The clickbaity headline of Velma’s existence is, essentially, “Woke Hollywood Made Velma Non-White and Gay,” which almost everyone with an X account and your emphysema-ridden grandpappy bought into.
Some even went so far as to call the show’s execution ironically misogynist in its attempts at parroting liberal ideologies. And then there were the racists, who simply hated Velma because, in this iteration, Velma Dinkley is Indian, and voiced by Mindy Kaling. If you’re curious what the losers who sit in a soundproof closet in their Studio City sublet recording YouTube rants are up to these days, just know they’re already harping on Velma’s second season, which dropped on Max April 25. (“Woke Velma” would be such a beautiful name for a baby girl.)
But I am here to stand proudly, with my stunning features and gorgeous blue eyes shimmering like pools of crystalline water, to tell you that those people are all wrong. Velma is great. It’s fast-paced and ridiculous, without being arrogant about how quick its wits are. What’s more: It’s got a knack for poking fun at itself and the Scooby-Doo franchise’s history, sprinkling little Easter eggs about for devoted fans to pick up and admire—if you can catch them before the show races to its next gag. Season 2’s best joke is one of those self-deprecating cracks, an episode-length farce that addresses the absence of Scooby in the show, which was one of the many points of contention among viewers. Even when Velma fires back at detractors, it does so slyly.
In Season 2’s premiere episode, the Mystery Inc. gang (sans Scooby) is still reeling from the reveal of a serial killer in the Season 1 finale. Velma (Kaling), Daphne (Constance Wu), Shaggy aka Norville (Sam Richardson), and Fred (Glenn Howerton) all had a hand in gathering the evidence, which pointed at Fred’s mother, Victoria (voiced by motherfucking Cherry Jones!) terrorizing the residents of their hometown of Crystal Cove. Victoria met her demise in the last season’s finale, and Fred has been trying to cope with the loss of his belittling mother by diving headfirst into mystery-solving. As part of his “spooky stuff hunting,” Fred converts to Catholicism, because in movies and TV, scary things are usually sacred religious iconography.
“Are you religious now?” Daphne asks Fred, who is holding a squirt gun filled with holy water. “I thought religious guys only worshiped Ayn Rand and feet.” (Again: Brilliant throwaway joke!) Fred tells Daphne he got into religion because the customers for his new mystery-solving business expect him to have some grounding element, and business is all about giving people what they want, which includes dogs. But Fred isn’t referring to Scooby-Doo, who is canonically Norville’s dog. Instead, Fred has two yapping Pomeranians who follow him around. “It’s a gimmick, but it works!” he tells Daphne. And how right he is: A talking dog with a speech impediment is the thing that has kept Scooby-Doo and its many iterations churning out new content for decades.
Given that Velma is an adult murder mystery, the gag later continues with a nod to two other series with similar thematic bloodshed. Fred tells Velma that he’s named his dogs “Jinx” and “Staircase,” a reference to two other shows about people trying to solve mysteries that revolve around enigmatic killers. Naturally, these two shows are also available to stream on Max. It’s sort of like when Netflix holds the director of any given Vanessa Hudgens-starring Christmas movie at gunpoint, forcing them to make her character contextually watch a Netflix original while cozying up on the couch with a lover. Except Velma’s joke is better because it’s an actual ably written punchline, and not just a reminder that corporations have permeated everything we do, say, touch, and watch. It’s also a great reminder that Parker Posey once said “I love to fuck, suck, and rim” in the fictionalized retelling of The Staircase, but that’s beside the point.
Later in the episode, Jinx and Staircase destroy a crucial piece of evidence in Season 2’s new mystery when they tear up a shoe left behind by a new killer. Fred sighs to himself and, defeated, says, “Maybe solving mysteries with dogs is a mistake.” It’s another line that pokes fun at Scooby-Doo’s history, and Scooby’s frequent blighting of a case with his clumsy dog body or ravenous addiction to Scooby Snax.
Fred is a bad mystery solver, and so are his dogs, because trying to solve a mystery with a dog sidekick is absolutely ludicrous. It’s just not something that would ever work. Imagine if Columbo used his basset hound to sniff out clues. Envision Natasha Lyonne in the next season of Poker Face with a Scottish terrier, yelling, “Ehhhhh, sic ’em!” in her gravelly voice. It would be incredible, but that doesn’t mean it’s realistic. That’s why we love Scooby-Doo: The show gives us a little window into an impossible reality, where our canine best friend can not only talk, but pull rubber masks off crooked bankers when we trap them inside of a barrel.
But Velma doesn’t need Scooby, and the show proves that with this extended bit with Fred’s dogs. In this iteration, dogs only get in the way of the mysteries, and hamper the fun, gleefully silly character work that the writers are composing. It’s a suggestion for Velma’s detractors, who came ready with the pitchforks right out the gate, to look a little harder and spend more time with the series. It’s layered enough that reconsidering the show, and peering a little closer at its jokes—which, by the way, are not “woke,” but rather roundabout quips at the idea of modern “wokeness”—is worth a go.
That’s not likely to happen, given that most people have made up their minds about this show, and that Max unceremoniously announced Season 2 just last week and dumped all 10 episodes on the platform at once. Velma probably won’t be back for a third season, but that’s okay. It can be a blip on the Scooby-Doo franchise’s lengthy history, a show that a select few people really got. Velma was always far more intelligent and shrewd than people gave it credit for, and those of us who love it can take pride in going against the grain, much like our favorite bespectacled mystery solver has always done.
