Elle

Did anyone order more nostalgia? The creators of Elle, the new Legally Blonde prequel, certainly seem to think the limits of prequels, sequels and threequels haven’t quite been stretched far enough. Envisaging a 16-year-old Elle Woods’s journey from sun-soaked Beverly Hills to rainy Seattle, the series, which was exec-produced by Reese Witherspoon, expands on the fish-out-of-water narrative of the beloved original.

After her plastic surgeon father (Tom Everett Scott) botches a celebrity nose job, Elle (Lexi Minetree) and her family are forced into exile in the Emerald City. The Valley girl is quickly relegated to the pink sheep of her new high school, met with scorn by her plaid-adorning classmates. But the indefatigably optimistic Elle is determined to win them over.

It’s the prequel that no one asked for (surely a Devil Wears Prada 2-style sequel showing Elle’s post-Harvard career would have made more sense?), and yet Minetree is so enchanting in channelling Reese Witherspoon that she makes the show work. While Witherspoon’s performance was undoubtedly so iconic that it’s a near-impossible task to replicate it, Minetree charmingly captures Elle’s spirit rather than engaging in mimicry.

When playing into the camp of its predecessors, the series is at its best. It features some social faux pas zingers reminiscent of the original film, including Elle insisting that she knows Bikini Kill: “I know bikinis… that kill.” But when it doesn’t, it falls flat. Elle’s love interest, Miles (Jacob Moskovitz), seems unnecessary, especially when she has much more interesting relationships to explore in world-weary classmate Liz (Gabrielle Policano) and altruistic school secretary Donna (Amy Pietz). Moreover, the notion that every kid in Seattle in the 90s – including the jocks, nerds, and, as Liz calls them, “kids with Microsoft money and kids with Boeing money” – was a socially progressive Kurt Cobain devotee is too ludicrous to be taken seriously.

But the main selling point, ultimately, is the self-aware nostalgia. The animated opening sequence alone is likely to elicit that wistfulness for a seemingly simpler, pre-social media era. We have Barbie pink palm trees, neon-laced Doc Martens, Nirvana motifs and the show’s title in bedazzled lettering, all set to Garbage’s I’m Only Happy When It Rains. And the longing for that era is why Elle exists in the first place. In our culture attached to IP-regeneration, it fills the void that the movie stars of yore, like Witherspoon, left in their wake.