In the 2001 comedy Legally Blonde, protagonist law student Elle Woods teaches her friend Paulette a move called the “bend and snap,” engineered to catch your crush’s attention. New prequel series Elle, which follows the character as a teen, uses the famous character to get your attention (bend), but lacks a hook (snap) to keep it.
The series follows Elle (Lexi Minetree) as she moves from LA to Seattle, where she meets skeptical peers and must find her place while remaining true to herself. Yeah, sounds familiar.
There’s even an internship contest that allows the show to recreate the essay portion of the film and to show how Ellie isn’t like your average sorority — I mean high school girl.
Minetree is charming and makes a perfect young Elle, echoing Reese Witherspoon’s bubbly but sincere performance without impersonating it. The problem is that the adversity the character faces feels like an after-school special.
On every episode, despite her misguided priorities, Elle ends up helping someone or learning something about herself. Her sense of justice even gets her involved in a criminal conspiracy (at least it’s not a murder trial) that turns her and her friends into a Scooby gang.
Unfortunately, the characters around Elle, including misfit friends Dustin (Zac Looker) and Liz (Gabrielle Policano), end up being more interesting than the lead. Probably because their character development isn’t hamstrung by the fact that their real “origin story” doesn’t happen for five more years in their fictional timeline.
Even her parents and their conflict are more fun to watch than she is, with her dad Wyatt (Tom Everett Scott) adapting to Seattle with aplomb and her mom Eva (June Diane Raphael) getting involved with a local mayoral candidate (James Van Der Beek in his last role). Side note, this show is a great reminder that Hollywood needs to cast Raphael in far more things!
The fact that this is a prequel set in the 90s exacerbates the confusion over who it’s really for by loading it with references that Gen Alpha are much less likely to get or understand. There is a joke about the founding of Amazon buried in one of the episodes that will go completely over the heads of many young people despite watching it on an Amazon-owned streaming service.
There is nothing wrong with a TV-14 show marketed as YA not appealing to adult sensibilities (though it does get confusing when Prime Video is promoting Elle alongside much steamier content like Off Campus and The Love Hypothesis, but that’s not the show’s fault).
What is wrong is that a studio chose to recycle IP popular with Millennials and Gen X, and watered it down for the YA crowd, so they could take advantage of name recognition. On the show, Elle’s mom mentions making a killer mocktail, but Elle is less like a mocktail and more like a glass of juice from concentrate with a tiny pink umbrella thrown in.
With the death of the CW and Freeform’s move away from original programming, it makes sense for streaming services to step up and fill the void. But younger audiences deserve original, interesting shows too, not just shows that got greenlit because Wednesday was a hit and the studio owned the rights.
Elle premieres on Prime Video on July 1.