The woke HBO Max series Velma has sparked bizarre conspiracy theories among leftists, who charge that the show must be a “right-wing psy-op” because of its sheer level of awfulness.
As Breitbart News reported, Velma has been savaged by audiences, earning the title of lowest-rated HBO series on IMDB with a horrific score of 1.3. While professional critics did not savage Velma with quite the same hot-blooded contempt as general audiences, the show did not exactly wow them either despite its woke bona-fides by race-swapping several characters and making Velma a lesbian Indian-American woman voiced by comedienne Mindy Kaling. On Rotten Tomatoes, the show has a tepid 55 percent rating among critics and a 6 percent rating among audiences.
According to Forbes contributor Paul Tassi, Velma has sparked such an intense backlash that woke leftists have resorted to conspiracy theories to explain its undeniable ineptitude. Per the article:
Velma is so bad in fact, that it’s spawning conspiracy theories that creator Mindy Kaling made what is essentially a parody of what the right wing thinks left wing comedy is like. As in, a show that not just recast most roles with new races, but also features loads and loads of “white guys, amiright?” jokes. The idea is that Kaling is a secretly conservative force in media trying to make the left look bad by making a cringey adult cartoon full of “this rich white guy has a small dong” jokes that the right can point at as everything wrong with race-recasted, social justice-influenced media.
Social media accounts with significant followings have latched onto the theory, according to Fox News, with one YouTuber who boasts over 600,000 subscribers agreeing that the show intentionally aims to anger “previous fans,” “men,” “white people,” and “stoner culture” to inspire a viral hate-watching campaign.
Tassi himself said the theory has some merit considering that Velma has almost nothing going in its favor. He compared it to a show like She-Hulk, which he himself appreciated despite the right-wing backlash.
“Velma is not defensible by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just bad. Making progressive jokes is fine so long as the jokes are good. They are not good,” wrote Tassi.
“I don’t know what Velma is doing. I’m not sure I subscribe to this ‘Mindy Kaling made a dogwhistle series for right-wing trolls’ theory, as the Occam’s Razor explanation is that the show is just…bad. The jokes are…bad. That’s really it,” he added. “I may continue watching out of morbid fascination, but man, this is truly one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen.”
Now, unsurprisingly, the show does appear to have its lone defenders in the woke ether. Writing for the far-left LGBTQ publication Out magazine, Mey Rude said that the show had become a victim of review bombs.
“Unfortunately, most of the hate being aimed at the show isn’t just a huge overreaction to a fairly good show with a lot of potential, but it’s also led by an angry mob of online trolls who haven’t watched the show and wouldn’t give it a fair shake if they did,” wrote Rude.
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