On Thursday, streaming service HBO Max premiered Velma, a new “adult animated comedy series,” focused on the Scooby-Doo character Velma as voiced by Mindy Kaling and the show has been criticized as an insult to fans, uncomfortably sexual in tone given it's about teenagers, and has been met with overwhelming jeers as it sits at a 9 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 2.5 out of 10 on IMDb.
One user on Rotten Tomatoes wrote, “absolutely bad. absolutely bad. The Scooby-Doo franchise didn´t deserve such cruelty” and another noted, “Unnecessarily sexual, especially for what has always been a children's show; Usually there was enough appropriate innuendo for adults to find humor, but this one really misses the spot. Sad that they always have to ruin an already successful program instead of just creating their own show.”
One user on Twitter said, “So far, Velma is as embarrassingly bad as we all predicted it would be. It has nothing humorous, original or inciteful to offer, and the only time it surprised me was when it was occasionally even worse than I'd predicted. Don't even bother hate-watching it. It's not worth it.”