#doing velma

The best review I’ve seen yet. A review that really seems to get to the heart of why this show doesn’t work. A review I’m going to be quoting in the future?

Is from Doug Walker.

Which, if anyone is qualified to talk about failed comedy, it’s Doug, but I’m still surprised. He’s not trying to be funny in this video, he’s not trying to be an angry critic, and he’s poking right into the inner workings of this show. How a writing team with comedy chops screwed it up so badly. Why the problem isn’t the race-bending or the attitude or the lack of faith to the source material. 

At one point he mentions that the show has ‘this wall of protective bullshit that's stopping it from being really funny or really clever.’

and he’s fucking right.

Honestly? I’d love to see more of this from Doug in the future. No Nostalgia Critic. No scripted rants or strange little skits made with Spirit Halloween costumes. No crunching or abusing other artists employed by Channel Awesome. Just Doug, drawing from all his experiences and failings as an artist, digging right into other media and giving it an honest and fair shake.

Analysis of Velma through the lens of Sarah Z’s ‘sacrificial trash’ concept

or

At least, until a season 2 comes out. I don’t wanna think about that right now.

Anyway, The AV Club (the only outlet that actually had a positive review for this thing) put out a new article today on South Asian women in television.

Honestly, before I read this, I’d’ve been hard-pressed to name shows with South Asian women other than The Big Bang Theory (nope) and Mindy Kaling’s projects. It’s nice to know there are other things out there (I’d forgotten Kamala Khan has her own show these days). 

But it’s still not enough. And frankly, we’re all beating around the bush when we say ‘South Asian’. I think Kamala Khan is the only television character to be explicitly Pakistani and Muslim. South Asia has a ton of diversity (linguistic, ethnic, religious, economic, caste-based), and yet we are only shown a very specific kind of South Asian woman on television. She’s usually upper middle class, vaguely Hindu (but actually secular, her religion is never shown to be a part of her life), with educated and successful (and strict) parents, and nothing else. In American television, we’re given more of a pop-culture version of South Asian women, instead of portraits of real people. Velma is no different in this case. The only things we get about her South Asian-American identity are (insulting) jokes about her body hair, and jokes about how all brown people are conflated as being Mexican. 

So what even is the point of making Velma South Asian? Honestly, I think it’s only because of Mindy Kaling’s involvement. I don’t believe Velma even counts as South Asian representation, because she’s not representative of any kind of South Asian-American experience. 

The only real thing that has come out of Velma’s being South Asian is the publicity from Mindy Kaling, and the right wing backlash.

like even more painful.

I think they’re trying to do a character arc for Velma, but it’s not really working because she’ll just acknowledge that she has sucked in the past, then continues to suck in the exact same ways? These writers rlly struggle with the show not tell.

Ep 7 was a mess. Tired critiques about gender expectations. The commentary here was old, old, and moldy. Men are held to lower standards and praised for mediocrity, we get it.

Random tonal whiplash into a chase scene (with the doors) that was well animated and designed as an homage, but it didn’t land well, considering that it was squished in between some much more serious scenes. 

Ep 8 got kind of meta with how flashbacks are structured on TV, and I felt like this joke was carried pretty well. 

I laughed, and I don’t feel like this joke overstayed its welcome. It was a cute way to combine the overlapping flashbacks, and it wasn’t trying to be An Important Commentary, it was just meta and silly. The rest of the episode? Nope.

So much of this show is the writers trying to be Important. Velma is not Important. If the writers room took their heads out of their asses, I think they could’ve found success. I think they think that an Adult Spinoff has to make Important Social Commentary, but it really doesn’t. It just has to play with the characters and themes in a more adult way. Velma isn’t here to play. Watching this show is like being peer pressured by the writers into laughing. 

Don’t have much to say tonight. A lot of this gets really repetitive. Do the writers think we have the attention span of a goldfish? You can show a character being obsessive without having them just constantly repeat lines about the thing they’re obsessed with.

Interestingly enough, this show is actually getting better.

And a great deal of laughter is induced by fear. I was working on a funny television series years ago. We were trying to put a show together that, as a basic principle, mentioned death in every episode and that this ingredient would make any laughter deeper without the audience's realizing how we were inducing belly laughs.

There is a superficial sort of laughter. Bob Hope, for example, was not really a humorist. He was a comedian with very thin stuff, never mentioning anything troubling. I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy. There is terrible tragedy there somehow. These men are too sweet to survive in this world and are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed.

--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

Since Doug Walker hit me over the head with his line about Velma hiding behind ‘a wall of protective bullshit’, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of comedy. So much comedy is based on vulnerability, and Velma’s writers up until now have been afraid to be vulnerable with the audience. Jokes land like porcupine spikes, coming from a place of defensiveness, almost like they’re daring the audience to do anything but laugh. And in this situation, instead of opening up, laughing deeply and with our whole heart, we wince. Cringe away. Clam up. So many people have said this show is difficult to watch because of the painful attempts at humor. 

Not pain as in pathos. Pain as in stubbing our toe and being frustrated at the lack of meaning behind it.

But this week, we actually got a bit of opening up and vulnerability. And eps 5 and 6 weren’t absolutely dreadful.

Of course, like any story revolving around high school kids, this vulnerability comes in the form of family.

If there’s one thing teen dramas get right, it’s that nothing is ever actually a teenager’s fault. We’re all really just paying for the sins of our parents. They’re either lying to us - or trying to change us - or hiding some dark family secret. But when it comes to truly crappy parents, no one beats my dad. 

--Episode 6 opening

Episode 6 deals greatly with parents. Velma begins spending time with her father and having fun, after realizing that she does actually want his approval. Fred fights against his father’s attempts to mold him. Norville [proto-Shaggy] starts rebelling against his parents for the first time in his life. And Daphne meets her birth parents.

And the writers lean into this! They give the characters time to express their feelings without leaning on snark. We see these relationships develop and change over the course of the episodes. And as a result of this emotional opening? The jokes start landing. I definitely laughed more tonight than the past two episode drops combined. 

Episode 5 had a similar emotional opening, but with the relationships between the kids. Norville and Velma grapple with the boundaries (and lack thereof) in their friendship, and Fred goes on a character arc that’s self-motivated (instead of previous ones where he reacts to things happening). Velma has a major growth moment where she gives herself up to the cops after curfew to let the other kids get home with the food. The episode ends on a really sweet note, when Norville takes it upon himself to make sure Velma won’t get in trouble.

Plus, these episodes do so much to further the mystery plot. Episodes 3 and 4 really let it drop, so it’s nice to get back to the overarching mystery. Of a mystery show.

Are two good episodes enough to redeem the show? No. There’s still plenty of the bullshit that I’m not happy with (especially with Velma’s appearance being mocked), but we definitely made some steps in a good direction. 

I don’t think this is going to evolve into a good show in the remaining episodes, but it definitely could get to be a less-bad one.

I take it back. There is stuff we can learn from this. I mean, it’s likely stuff that has already been talked about, and I don’t know how much new stuff can come from a discussion about this show, but damnit I’m gonna try.

Several angles here:

(and p much all of these tie into corporate exploitation)

The race-swapped cast (and subsequent praise and backlash, predictable as always)

No Scooby in a show that is ostensibly in the franchise named for him

HBO and WB saying that all attention is good attention - hate watching and discussion brings $$$ in as reliably as praise

Oh G-d am I part of this machine for talking about this? (I’m not going to worry about this, otherwise this blog would not exist)

Capitalizing on nostalgia for old franchises

None of these angles are particularly interesting to me. They’ve been done to death. I’m not going to do them unless they come up naturally in the course of my analysis.

One angle I am interested in right now: what makes a franchise spin-off ‘adult’? When the word ‘adult’ gets used, what are the audience expectations? What does ‘adult’ mean to the people creating the thing, and what does it mean to the people watching it? How does an ‘adult’ spin-off fit into the existing franchise, and what new ideas can it bring to the table?

Hey fam. I know this is mad late, but let’s be honest, trying to write a wrapup on Velma was about as painful as watching it. Enjoy!

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So speaking of HBO, I just watched Marc Maron’s From Bleak to Dark, which is one of the funniest standup routines I’ve seen in a long time.

It was also deeply dark and pretty disturbing in places.

I mean, he didn’t hold back. COVID? Auschwitz? Terminal illness? Abortion? Disinformation? Antisemitism? Suicide?

All there.

And it was funny as fuck.

-

I’m gonna keep coming back to Kurt Vonnegut here, because I think he got to the root of comedy: that all humor is based on fear. “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.”

From Bleak to Dark worked because of this fear. We’re exhausted. The state of the world doesn’t seem to be getting any better, and it’s just hard to navigate being human right now. How on earth can you make this material funny?

And the answer is: by reaching deep into the dark places of the soul, plucking the strings of our agonies and worst fears, and dragging them into the light. Saying: Hey, I’m human, you’re human, and here we are trapped in the mess of our humanity. I see you. Hi.

And we laugh.

Because what else are we gonna do about it?

As both Maron and Vonnegut remarked, the jokes in Auschwitz must’ve been amazing.

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I stumbled on this essay by Matthew Morgan on the state of modern irony, and it stuck a chord:

One feature of the free mind is an ability to entertain contradictory ideas simultaneously; at its most refined, this is an appreciation of the ironic, which Schlegel showed is borne of contradiction. Albert Camus talked about the Absurd as the search for value in a valueless universe. Humans are both the only known creatures who comprehend the meaninglessness of the cosmos and the animals most insistent on discovering meaning, demonstrating that irony is at the heart of the human condition. To embrace irony is, therefore, to embrace life.

Irony, the essay points out, strikes at the contradictions of our messy lives. Vonnegut was a master of irony, using it in such a subtle way that it sailed over many peoples’ heads. In an interview with Playboy in 1973, he famously stated: 

You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit...But it’s a useful, comforting sort of horseshit, you see? That’s what I object to about preachers. They don’t say anything to make anybody any happier, when there are all these neat lies you can tell. And everything is a lie, because our brains are two-bit computers, and we can’t get very high-grade truths out of them. But as far as improving the human condition goes, our minds are certainly up to that. That’s what they were designed to do.

Vonnegut’s comforting lies contradict the inherent meaninglessness of life; they give us something to hold onto. Something to reach out with, to show us that we understand each other. That we all want and fear. That we can form community with this shared understanding. An understanding based in irony. In the contradictions of life.

What does all this have to do with Velma? Bear with me. I’m getting there.

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Morgan’s essay also gets at what I think is an issue with a lot of current comedy:

...social commentary has been lost amid the exponential growth of shock-value comedy, the inanity of which is exposed by its label: rather than using shock to change values, the vacuous comedy of something like Family Guy values only the shock. This kind of humour merely consolidates one’s place within the in-group of cynical cool kids by sniggering at increasingly “offensive” jokes, a sort of lack-of-virtue signalling.

...The reason that shows like Family Guy are so empty is that they want to mock everything (because that’s detached and cool) while refusing to show us anything (because that would be old-fashioned and ridiculous).

And here’s where we get to Velma.

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High school is a weird time. Lots of teenage media would have us believe that high school is when we come into our own: amongst the parties and rebellion and teenage love and heartbreak, we are tested, and emerge from this crucible as a fully-formed person. Nothing could be further from the truth. High school is messy, ugly, and painful. It doesn’t look like what it does on the screen. The idea that ‘high school is the best years of your life’ is oft repeated, which in hindsight is horseshit. But maybe we believed that deep down, back when we were in high school, and were terrified that we were doing it wrong. 

And so many of us emerge from this with scars. 

There is a lot of adult media about high school kids! Because on some level, we’re all still trying to process this time of our lives. Putting it into art, stylizing it or flaying it open, helps us to do so. And for teens watching this media, hopefully we’re saying: it’s ok. This is messy ugly and painful, but you’re not alone.

I think Velma is trying to do this. Velma goes to some serious lengths to dig into this messy high school experience. It also pokes at how the media treats the high school experience, which is awesome in theory.

The problem is, it falls into a very high school sort of trap. The kind of trap that we were supposed to mature past. The kind of trap that a lot of shock comedy hasn’t matured past.

As Morgan says, it’s that Velma wants to mock high school media - because it’s detached and cool. I remember this being a thing in high school. In order to be cool, you had to be detached. You could never show real emotion or real hurt. Everything had to roll off like water on a duck’s back.

Because showing real vulnerability wasn’t cool. Cool was not caring. Cool was being able to hurt others, without showing any hurt yourself. Velma wants to skewer the idealized version of high school we see in media - but instead, it just becomes another high school bully.

And all the criticism that has been levelled at Velma? It’s rolled off. Like water on a duck’s back. HBO has renewed it for a second season. 

It’s like watching your high school bully get elected class president.

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I’m not gonna dissect the content of Velma, because enough people have done that already. The piles of shitty jokes, the weird meta commentary, the moments that don’t work, the moments that hurt - it’s all been compiled, and I don’t want to beat a dead horse (I’m the horse in this metaphor. Because dealing with Velma is painful). 

But I do want to say, it’s an exquisite study on how comedy fails. Fails to reach out, fails to plunge deep into its audience and pull on its worst fears. Fails to make us seen, fails to find a shared humanity.

Doug Walker, who of all people is qualified to comment on bad comedy, probably said it best: 

[Velma has] this wall of protective bullshit that's stopping it from being really funny or really clever.

And that’s that. There’s a wall. Velma is not reaching an audience, because it physically cannot. 

Is it the writers’ own fears that built this wall? Fears of being mocked? Wanting to be detached and cool? 

Because to make real connections, we run the risk of being hurt. Being hurt is a part of life. And the best comedy overcomes this. Says ‘Hi. I know you’re hurting. So am I. Can we make this less painful together?’ 

If Velma is to be believed, we cannot. All we can do is carry on hurting each other, with no connection or relief in sight. 

Got my emotional support snacks:

I gotta hand it to the writers, they did this mystery better than BBC Sherlock.

That might be a low bar, but they did clear it.

Most of the background info needed for the mystery had been set up in previous episodes, and there were only a few more elements introduced to solve things. These last two eps were not boring, there were a fair few twists that work for keeping viewers on their toes, and it was wrapped up pretty well, while leaving plenty for a second season (oh G-d help) to explore.

Some character development did happen in the end, even if it was in an extremely messy and sudden way. You could understand how the characters got to their current points. It was - sudden. The characters were almost exactly the same way as they were halfway thru the series - then all of a sudden, hey! Look! Development! They haven’t turned into good people, or even people resembling their classic counterparts, but they did change, and character conflicts were set up for the second season.

One thing that didn’t change at all in these last eps? The writers doing really ham-fisted social commentary in character monologues. The ‘rich white man privilege’ actually did have a bit of plot relevance in the end, but it was still about as subtle as getting slapped in the face with a disembodied brain. 

I want to take ‘snide quip about social issues’ out of these writers’ toolbox. It would make a better show for it. These things bog down the pace, they make the audience cringe, and they land so poorly. Like, yeah, Charlie Grandy, we get it, you’re a self-aware white guy.

One thing I am glad about tho: Velma has treated her friends like shit this entire show. And she does wind up suffering consequences for it! Norville leaves her, and we get the feeling Daphne’s reached a breaking point. It woulda been cool for these consequences to have come sooner. These characters are fucking martyrs for putting up with Velma. If consequences had come for her earlier in the show, we might’ve had more time for character growth earlier on. One of the biggest problem that reviewers have had is that Velma honestly sucks to spend time with. It might’ve helped a lot if this had been acknowledged more and she had been given more moments that hint to future growth. 

Honestly Velma does make me sad. I could see myself enjoying this series a lot. There’s a ton of potential, and it’s been wasted. The problems are all in the writing room. And I don’t know if the reviews from this season will inspire them to make change, but it would be incredible if that happened.