Velma Renewed For Season 2, And Fans Already Hate It
The worst-ranked show on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes has been confirmed to have season 2. But how?
Velma, the Scooby Doo spin-off from HBO's Max and Charlie Grandy, received a wave of hate even before its release. While critics' reviews were mixed, fans' reviews were extremely negative — Velma received an average rating of 1.3 on IMDb.
Scooby Doo is a franchise with a huge fan base, and many of today's grownups literally grew up watching the animated series. The first blow came when the show's creators admitted that the spinoff will not include Scooby Doo himself, who's literally a symbol and soul of the franchise.
This decision was based on the fact that the show was intended for a more adult audience than the animated series, and it was the beloved dog that made it childish. In addition, all of the characters have been heavily redesigned, from appearance to personality: Velma is now Indian, Daphne is Asian, Shaggy is African-American, and Fred is presumably queer.
The fans, as expected, didn't appreciate such changes. Many said that the show had become a platform for "woke social propaganda,"which had an extremely sad effect on the quality of the series."
In doing so, the show has managed to piss off both sides of the aisle: the conservative fans sees Velma as a victim of mandatory diversity policies in projects, while their opponents criticize the show for making character replacements just for the sake of it. Mindy Kaling, one of the show's producers, tried to respond to the wave of hate in an interview with Variety.
"The original Scooby-Doo, which we're a fan of, is also really rooted in another era and reflective of the cultural landscape of the '60s and the '70s and what people traditionally put on TV. It just felt like, if we can have the characters be anything, why not do something new?" she said.
It would seem that the most obvious solution after such a failure would be to cancel the show. But recently it was announced that the Velma's been renewed for a second season. How did this happen?
It would seem that... the haters saved the show. Velma came out so badly that it caused a huge stir in both publications and fan forums — everyone was talking about it. And we know that there' is rarely such a thing as bad PR. Hate-watch brought Velma huge views, and people are now waiting for more of their guilty pleasure.