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The Amazon Prime Video show “Elle” is billed as a prequel series to the 2001 novel turned hit movie “Legally Blonde,” but its eight episodes play more like a remake. Sure, “Elle” turns back the clock to 1995, when its title
character — the bubbly, pink-obsessed lawyer-to-be made iconic by a young Reese Witherspoon — was a rising junior at Beverly Hills High. Yet the arc of “Elle” hews so closely to the trajectory our heroine takes in the original film that it’s hard to believe one person underwent the same maturation process twice over, unless she entered Harvard Law with a bad case of amnesia. Better, then, to view “Elle” as a kind of alternate universe tale where Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree) simply had her epiphanies a few years earlier. That way, it’s easier to appreciate what this bildungsroman does well, which is a fair amount.
There is a ceiling on these accomplishments, though. Created by Laura Kittrell (“Insecure”) and executive produced by Witherspoon through her banner Hello Sunshine, “Elle” is content to live within the shadow of its inspiration. Every chapter takes its name from an enduring line in screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith’s script, like “Whoever Said Orange Is the New Pink Is Seriously Deranged” or “What, Like It’s Hard?” This device has the unfortunate effect of highlighting how the joke writing on “Elle,” while capable and entertaining — “I don’t run, but I do walk with conviction!” — is coloring within lines someone else already drew. The show positions itself to introduce a generation of young women already watching Amazon due to YA hits like “The Summer I Turned Pretty” to the “Legally Blonde” ethos, aided by a lead performance from Minetree that perfectly channels Witherspoon’s girly-girl pep. But “Elle” doesn’t meaningfully alter or elaborate upon the themes first explored by author Amanda Brown, because it isn’t trying to.
That said, “Elle” fulfills its own (blonde) ambitions, smartly selecting a new pond in which this aged-down Elle can be a fish out of water. Rather than following a boyfriend to law school of her own volition, the show’s protagonist is forced to move to Seattle when her father Wyatt (Tom Everett Scott), a plastic surgeon, botches a nose job, making his name mud west of La Brea. Forced to abandon her three-point plan for a perfect junior year, Elle, Wyatt and her mother Eva (June Diane Raphael) relocate to rainy Seattle, where Elle’s impeccable taste in designer bags is more disdained than appreciated. The change in location also keeps “Elle” from hewing too close to “Clueless,” the Big Kahuna of media built around a willful teen girl in mid-’90s L.A. Elle’s best friend Madison (Jessica Belkin) has a car phone that’s just as impressive as Cher’s computer-powered closet. (The Pacific Northwest instead invokes “10 Things I Hate About You,” another Lutz-Smith collaboration.)
Unlike the movie, which was contemporary to its time, “Elle” is a period piece, laying on its cultural references thick and with a deliberately, almost parodically broad brush. In this Seattle, everyone looks like an extra from “Singles,” stomping down the halls of Rainier West High School in plaid flannels and Doc Martens while debating the relative merits of Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain. The dynamic isn’t exactly the same as a sorority sister among aspiring attorneys, but it’s very close: serious, socially conscious Seattleites look down on Elle’s hyper-feminine aesthetic; Elle is appalled by her classmates’ contempt for consumerism and visible effort; both sides have something to learn from one another. Seattle just has the added bonus of a ready-made soundtrack, a collection of grunge-era hits led by Garbage’s “I’m Only Happy When It Rains,” the semi-ironic theme song.
Elle’s new peers are a tough crowd for her talents of accessorizing and quoting Cosmo from memory. Ingratiating herself with the popular crowd in California was a matter of perseverance; in Washington, queen bee Kimberly (Chandler Kinney) clocks Elle as a — gasp! — poser for the sin of wearing a Nirvana T-shirt to fit in. (Though she still decks it out in hearts.) Record store employee Liz (Gabrielle Pelicano) is reflexively suspicious of Elle’s upbeat enthusiasm. Student activist Dustin (Zac Looker), doubtless just a few years from participating in the WTO protests, is the most open-minded to Elle’s charms, but only once she joins forces with him to advocate for underpaid school staffers. Dustin is down for the cause; Elle just wants to help the principal’s secretary Donna (Amy Pietz), the only other person at school willing to talk horoscopes with her.
Donna’s plight becomes the onramp to a proto-legal subplot about potentially stolen funds that eventually gets Elle in full cross-examination mode. Despite an unnecessary escalation of stakes about halfway through the season, the teen investigator mode is where “Elle” most accurately channels the spirit “Legally Blonde,” plus some high school-specific flourishes like a “Breakfast Club”-themed detention episode. The storyline prompts sympathy and growth on both sides of the divide: Elle’s counterparts realize they’re wrong to dismiss fuchsia and pom-poms as inherently unworthy, while Elle herself starts to wonder if “I really am the vapid L.A. girl they all think I am.” A quarter century after the original “Legally Blonde,” the distinction between style and substance is still worth exploring.
“Elle” fares less well with the family dynamics that come with a lead character who still lives in her parents’ house. Wyatt is a bit of a non-entity who fades into the background; Raphael is a wonderful comic performer who still comes off a little too grounded and earthy to be Elle’s supposed clone before her daughter starts to assert some independence. (An Anna Faris or younger Kristen Chenoweth type feels closer to the mark.) The elder Woods woman gets shoehorned into the main story through an underdeveloped thread about volunteering for the mayoral campaign of school superintendent Dean Wilson (James Van Der Beek in his final role), though it’s possible “Elle” was working around the schedule and abilities of an actor who went public with his cancer diagnosis in 2024.
On the other hand, it’s not a coincidence that the weakest parts of “Elle” are the ones that are also the most unique to it in comparison with “Legally Blonde.” (In addition to the Woods household, there’s a romantic interest who never feels like more than a box to be checked, especially when he isn’t serving the function of luring Elle away from her comfort zone.) This is a show that’s quite comfortable working from its inspiration, and much less so when it’s attempting to forge its own path. That last part isn’t quite in the Elle Woods spirit, but “Elle” gets close enough.
All eight episodes of “Elle” are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
