And Velma.
Mindy Kaling is the driving force behind a new "adult" cartoon take on the Scooby Doo characters, minus Scooby, called Velma and centering on a character called Velma Dinkley, beloved nerdy member of the Mystery, Inc. gang.
Mostly, people hate. I've watched a few episodes and I am not a fan.
SOME of the criticism comes from dude-bros who decry it for being too "woke": Velma's Indian, Daphne is Asian (with two moms), and Norville (not called Shaggy in this show) is mixed race (black mom, white dad).
I could give a fig about their races. I'm cool with these originally white characters being a different race. They come from an era where white was the default and any other race was exotic, at best, and a comic relief caricature, at worst. It's high time that we have people of other races and cultures in our stories as just regular people. Regular people aren't always white.
My beef with the show is deeper than the epidermis. The characterization of Velma, Daphne, Fred (who remains white), and Norville bear no resemblance to the original characters in the countless iterations of Scooby Doo over the past fortyish years. The Velma in this show is not a confident nerd who employs her intellect to foil the villains, but an insecure, unpopular, obsessive, and, honestly, kind of mean girl. She's not even the smartest of the bunch anymore, asking "Norville" for help with math at one point. The others are equally out of character. This is not so much a "fresh look" on the old characters as a gutting and remodeling, like a 1920s bungalow in a gentrifying neighborhood. Outside, looks similar to the original. Inside, unrecognizable.
But this Buzzfeed article attempts to cast Velma as the next iteration of Mindy Kaling's self-loathing portrayals as an Indian-American female. The writer says that Mindy Kaling has "a long career of writing and performing a specific kind of Indian woman: dorky, self-absorbed, insecure, obsessed with attaining the romantic validation of caustic white guys, and eager to fling cultures under the bus to get it." The Buzzfeed writer says, "More damning than her characters' obsession with white guy is their casually racist self-hatred" and notes the "collapse" of Kaling's characters into her actual self, or vice versa. Essentially, the author is saying that all of Kaling's characters are about Kaling's own self-loathing as an Indian woman in America. Quite a casual and distant psychological analysis. Quite an indictment of her work too.
I'm no expert on Mindy Kaling's career. I’ve only ever actually seen her in the American version of The Office, and wasn’t taken by or offended by her character. But I didn’t watch much of the show either because I found it sub-par to the British version. And I never watched The Mindy Project or Sex Lives of College Girls because everything I read about them suggested to me that they weren't my style.
I have watched Never Have I Ever, every single episode. Mindy Kaling doesn't actually appear in it, but is the show's creator and executive producer. It's a show about a teenaged Indian girl named Devi Vishwakumar, growing up in suburban Los Angeles. She's dealing with the death of her father at a young age and generally growing up and being a teenager. It's hilariously narrated by John McEnroe (and occasionally other people). Devi has some rage issues, partly stemming from the death of her father and partly stemming from teen angst. So the choice of McEnroe to be the one to tell her story is inspired. I love the show.
I feel that Never Have I Ever is NOT just a show about an Indian-American teenaged girl. It's about an American teenaged girl, who is culturally Indian. Distinction without a difference? Maybe, but Devi Vishwakumar IS an archetype. She's not an archetypal Indian teenager, but an archetypal American teenager, who is culturally Indian. Devi’s repeated lapses in judgment and in the same general direction are infuriating sometimes. WHY does she keep being so stupid? But that’s a teenager thing, continually making the same or similar dumb mistakes and then, finally, FINALLY learning from them.
I saw Devi not as an archetypal ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) teenager, but as a confused teenager who happens to be Indian. She often rebels against her culture, and other times embraces it. I completely relate to that, even though I am definitely not an ABCD.
However, I was a smart teenaged girl once. I could relate to Devi's desire to fit in, her being proud and feeling weird about being smart, her competitiveness competing with her laziness. I even related to Devi alternately rebelling against and relating to her culture, only my culture was Southern-American-Cowboy, not South Asian.
Anyway, the idea of a smart teenaged girl, struggling to fit in and trying to distinguish herself from her cultural heritage is a universal theme everyone can embrace. I do not see Devi Vishwakumar as a manifestation of one Indian-American woman's self-loathing, but a smart take on what it's like to be a teenaged girl in America. As I said earlier in this post, it's high time that we have people of other races and cultures in our stories as just regular people. Devi is a regular teenager who happens to be Indian. We need to normalize the idea that not being white is normal. Never Have I Ever does that brilliantly.
Because I haven't seen the entirety of Kaling's oeuvre, I can’t speak to the larger point the Buzzfeed writer makes of Velma fitting neatly into Kaling’s own self-loathing. But I can say this, I do not think that Devi Viswakumar is a manifestation of Kaling's self-loathing. So I am not sure that Kaling even hates herself in the way the writer thinks she does.
But back to Velma . . . .
Because I'm not onboard with the idea that Kaling in some Freudian way repeatedly creates characters manifesting her own self-hatred, I can't say the Velma fits into that mold. But I can say that the only resemblance the Velma TV show shares with Scooby Doo are the character names and character wardrobe. There’s not a hint of the classic characters’ personalities. They’re all loathsome and self-absorbed, except for “Norville,” who is now apparently the smart one.
Also, the idea that this cartoon was apparently made for grown ups is ridiculous. It's filled with sexual innuendo, unfunny political jabs, and references to drugs, sex and violence. It’s the very essence of what children think adulthood is all about. What makes Velma bad is not Mindy Kaling’s alleged self-loathing, which I take issue with, but that it thinks that puerile jokes about sex etc. is what amounts to adult humor. It's not smart. It's not funny. And it's not even fun nostalgia because it makes these beloved characters unrecognizable.
Also, there’s no dog.
