Currently: Velma

And once again, I find myself asking the question: “Does Mindy Kaling hate herself? And if she does, why does she keep making it everyone’s problem?” HBO Max’s brand-new show “Velma,” starring Mindy Kaling (“The Office” and “The Mindy Project”) as the titular character, attempts to give the Mystery Inc. gang a… makeover. That’s right, in the new show, Velma is brown and bisexual, Shaggy is black (and hates drugs), Daphne is Asian (with lesbian moms), and the show focuses on the female experience. However, the makeover goes horribly wrong, very quickly.

In the first FOUR minutes, Velma, a self-described nerd and loser, is arrested for the serial killer-esque murder of popular girl Brenda. During her interrogation (by the two lesbian moms, of course), the police officers comment on her weight, masculine facial features, and hairy arms in rapid succession, making this show an instant top ten for examples of racism toward Indians in media, sitting on a list with the likes of Apu (“the Simpsons”), Baljeet (“Phineas and Ferb”), and Ravi (“Jessie”). But the show isn’t just racist. It’s also objectively bad. Viewers have rated it as the third worst rated tv show on IMDB, ever.

My brother, Suvan Campbell (sophomore, biochemistry), made an excellent comment after he got through the first episode: “It feels like they wrote a story and then slapped the “Scooby, Doo” IP [intellectual property] on it.” Basically, Kaling and co. wrote a story about growing up, losing your mother, struggling with identity, and then asked if they could throw the names Velma, Fred, and Daphne in there. There’s no Scooby, Shaggy is a completely different character, and although the “squad” might find their way together by the end of the season (although I don’t know if any viewers will last that long), the show doesn’t have the nostalgic feel they advertised it with. It’s a trend in Hollywood that I hope the failure of “Velma” kills, since it takes more than recognizable characters and places to tell an appealing story.

Now, this week’s Currently… isn’t about “Is racism bad?” or a debate on whether this episode’s comments are racist or not. The conversation I’d like to have isn’t about racism in our stories or the need for diversity, themes you might remember from last week’s column. Instead, “Velma” is created and headlined by Mindy Kaling, a brown woman and one of the forefronts of South Asian presence in Hollywood. She’s listed as not just an actor or a creator, but directly responsible for the writing itself. What better could we ask for? A brown woman telling her story. Are we even allowed to call it racist?

Perhaps racist, a word often used to describe the act of complex power structures enacting their wishes on the marginalized simply over the color of their skin, is not the word to use in this situation. Instead, we could say that Kaling has a penchant for telling stories that feel authentic to her but tend to highlight microaggressions that most of her Indian viewers have encountered already. I think it is well summarized by Brahmjot Kaur in his NBC News article on the Velma pushback:

“From Mindy Lahiri in ‘The Mindy Project’ to Devi in ‘Never Have I Ever’ to Bela in ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls,’ some have pointed out that Kaling’s lead South Asian characters share similar qualities: self-deprecating humor, a disconnect from their culture, an obsession with sex, making inappropriate comments and a romantic affinity toward white men.”

This recurring character in Mindy’s content, an “Indian loser girl” you could say, is not an accurate representation of the Indian-American experience. And while Mindy may be trying to tell her story, it feels old and reused after many retellings of it. The Indian-American community wants something fresh and new, and they deserve it—a break from the “Indian loser” stereotype that has been perpetuated by Kaling and Hollywood.

However, my controversial take argues that maybe we shouldn’t be blaming Mindy Kaling—pretty much the only brown woman allowed anywhere near a script—for this problem. What arises is a common question: Why isn’t Mindy Kaling allowed to make bad TV? How come when regularly atrocious shows come out, the entirety of the Internet doesn’t rise to attack its creator? Adam Sandler got greenlit to make the same exact bad, misogynistic script over and over again, but you didn’t see anyone talking about that? And the final nail—maybe Mindy Kaling’s experience reads as racist and cringey, but why shouldn’t she be allowed to tell her story?

See, the problem with representation is that we often hold the glass ceiling-breaker on far too high a pedestal. It isn’t normal to expect a woman with a long and lucrative TV career behind her to keep coming up with an original moneymaker every two years. And it probably isn’t fair to her, either. So why can’t we tolerate some mediocrity every so often? The truth is, proper representation means that not only are the underrepresented allowed to succeed, they have to be allowed to fail as well.

Now, I just want to soften the blow for all my readers who I know hate Mindy Kaling’s erroneous representation with all of their heart. It’s true, "Velma" is objectively a horrible show (it genuinely feels like the hundredth time I’ve said this), but it really should be allowed to be. Kaling and co. took a mediocre story, slapped some marketable IP on it, attempted to write some clickbait-esque and controversial lines, and then shipped it to HBOMax, clearly without a second thought. It’s a horrible representation of the Indian-American experience and I sincerely recommend that nobody watch it. It’s not funny, it’s not original, it definitely belongs on the lowest-rated shows of all time. But that doesn’t mean you should take to Twitter with all your anti-Mindy Kaling cannons primed and ready. It’s time we let each other fail sometimes.