Amazon’s ‘Legally blonde’ prequel is sweet but silly
TV REVIEW A quarter of a century after the premiere of “Legally blonde”, Amazon has released the prequel series “Elle”, about the formative teenage years of the iconic blonde Elle Wood.
A period in her life that she then apparently completely repressed, if I’ve understood the whole thing correctly?
Prequels. They are rarely needed. Rarely does anyone ask for them. And with a few illustrious exceptions, such as the “Star Wars” series “Andor”, Taylor Sheridan’s “1883” and the definitive prequel-elegant “Better Call Saul”, they rarely contribute much.
Yet they keep coming, because people watch them after all, and new ideas carry a greater financial risk. And the latest news on the front is Prime Video’s big summer investment “Elle”.
It is thus the “Legally blonde” universe that has been expanded again, 25 years after the first film premiered and catapulted an already well-known but not so famous Reese Witherspoon to the stars.
She played the stereotypical California girl and perpetually pink-wearing arch-blonde Elle Woods, who started law school at Harvard after being dumped by her boyfriend, and once there turned out to be far smarter than he, or anyone else for that matter, had anticipated.
The film, which was based on a book by Amanda Brownwas a smash hit, which was soon followed by a second film and later branched out into a musical and developed into an entire franchise. And over the years, both the original film’s status as one of the best and most inspiring comedies of the 00s and Elle Wood’s status as a feminist icon have endured, and also trickled down to younger generations.
So that Amazon, who owns the rights to this gold mine, decided to make a prequel series is not at all surprising.
But slightly more eyebrow-raising, is that “Elle” is something so strange as a prequel that more or less invalidates the entire premise of the original work.
Admittedly, the setup is quite funas long as you don’t start thinking.
The year is 1995 and Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree) is looking forward to another great year as the popular high school girl in sunny, luxurious Bel-Air when her parents inform her that they must flee to Seattle due to a botched nose job her father performed on a celebrity woman.
And suddenly, an optimistic, Cosmopolitan-reading Barbie is forced to learn to navigate among the strange rules of the game in the rainy stronghold of grunge, among flannel shirts, skateboards, cynicism, anti-capitalism and consistently sour supervisors. She changes, deepens, engages socially, discovers her strengths – and shows evidence of an obvious talent for law.
If the intended audience is over 40 or 20-year-olds or both is a bit unclear. The 90s hit and the nostalgic references for those of us who remember the news feed are like sticks in the back, while the script mostly moves in typical YA territory, with too much generic teen drama, too little humor, and a certain smack of modern values that few teenagers expressed at the time.
Still, there’s a lot that actually works in this series, which, like Elle herself, is sweet as cotton candy and has a winning personality.
Until, as I said, you start thinking after. Because wait a little now and stop and cover.
If Elle Woods went through this transformative period of enlightenment in high school, then what happened between 1995 and 2001, when she started all over again from square one?
Did she suffer from severe memory loss? Or what?
We will surely get a reasonable explanation in the next season.
Or, more likely, never.
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