‘Velma’ Is A Smart, Pithy ‘Scooby-Doo’ Update — Except For One Thing

Despite, shockingly, just not being weird enough, Netflix’s “Wednesday” did succeed at following in the footsteps of the CW’s “Nancy Drew” in that it helped usher in a new era of female teenage TV sleuths who specialize in creepy crimes. And now, that torch has been passed to “Velma,” HBO Max’s entry into the iconic “Scooby-Doo” universe that premieres Thursday.

A spinoff of the ’60s and ’70s cartoon “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!,” “Velma” catapults its cowl-neck sweater-wearing, spooky mystery-solving nerd to the lead character. Voiced by Mindy Kaling, who also serves as a producer and co-creator with frequent collaborator and showrunner Charlie Grandy, Velma has complexity, contradictions and more nuance than ever.

Part of that is because of the way the OG series was formatted. It’s an animated, adventure-seeking series that is less about the group of distinctive teenage sleuths — and their scaredy-cat great dane — of which Velma was a part, than the wacky mysteries they challenge themselves to crack in every episode.

(Fading central characterizations into the background is not unlike many adult crime procedurals today, including “Law and Order.”)

“Velma,” obviously, delves deeper into her narrative, giving her an emotionally unavailable dad, a mysteriously missing mother, friends, frenemies, and a sexuality while rightly positioning her as the central gumshoe in an increasingly bizarre case of murdered hot girls at her school.

It’s what you might expect from the “Scooby-Doo” universe, though very obviously sprung in part from the mind of Kaling, who infuses her identifiable humor, pithiness and cultural identity into Velma. Her race was changed from white in the original series to Indian American here.

Like previous iterations of “Scooby-Doo” that came after the original, “Velma” propels the character into the present day — reimagining her as strictly a high school student without the Scooby gang by her side but still gifted with the ability to solve crimes.

The mystery-loving group, as we learn later in the season, doesn’t exist in this iteration, though there are many smart nods to its likeness gleefully scattered throughout the series.