I am here to report, with equal parts surprise and delight, that I really, really enjoyed the first season of Elle, Prime Video’s Legally Blonde prequel series. It’s charming and sweet and fun and very in line with the essence of little miss Woods comma Elle. Plus, it has canon lesbian characters with actual non-devastating plotlines and personalities outside their sexualities! A win-win, really.
I won’t lie: I was very hesitant going into this show. I LOVED the Legally Blonde movie as a teen; my friends and I quoted Reese Witherspoon’s iconic character all through high school. In college, despite initially balking at its existence, once I gave it a chance, I also fell in love with Legally Blonde: The Musical. (A show that is still firmly in my Broadway playlist rotation.) So I have a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in the franchise, which means the bar was high, and sometimes going into a show like that can set it up for failure. I was afraid I wouldn’t like this show and that this review was going to have me telling you all the ways this strayed from Legally Blonde lore, but I am SO, so glad I can instead tell you all the things I loved about it.
Of course, I should have known, no matter how high the bar, Elle Woods would pass with flying colors. (Get it? Bar? Like the bar exam? Eh hem, anyway.)
There is ONE thing you do have to let go of re: original Legally Blonde in order to make this prequel fit. The general conceit of Legally Blonde is that Elle has never really met any hardships before she got to Harvard Law. And in this series, she does go through a similar arc to what she went through in the movie: going somewhere new and finding out, for the first time, she doesn’t fit in. I’m willing to hand-wave that because of how much I ended up enjoying this show. I can headcanon that after the events of this show, Elle goes to UCLA and thrives, and eventually has to relearn some lessons. Who among us, you know? And while it’s similar, it’s not a complete 1:1, so it never feels like a true rehashing.
If you’re able to suspend your disbelief on that one front, this show is a really great time. Lexi Minetree is an absolutely perfect Teen Elle Woods. She embodies Elle’s charm, grace, and relentless optimism. The most important thing about Elle Woods is that she turned the ’90s trope of the ditzy valley girl on its head. She is still just as feminine and fashion-obsessed and pink-loving and…blonde, but she’s not vapid or a mean girl. She’s smart, though occasionally naïve about how things work because she’s rich and white and privileged. And she’s kind. That stays true through this whole show. No matter how down she gets, no matter how hard things are, Elle Woods is kind. Even when she’s misguided, even when her plans go haywire, even when she does hurt people, she never does it intentionally. Her heart is always, always in the right place.
All of the cast was great, actually. Elle meets a bunch of new kids when her family is forced to leave their warm, cozy life in LA for cold, rainy Seattle. There’s Dustin (Zac Looker), British skater boy activist; Miles (Jacob Moskovitz), a track runner who has eyes for Elle; and Shannon (Danielle Chand), the head of the social committee and the first student to be kind to Elle when she shows up a pink beacon in a sea of grey plaid. James Van Der Beek also appears in his last role before he sadly passed away earlier this year. Plus, there’s Kimberly (Chandler Kinney, who was in Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin/Summer School), the resident popular mean girl who is nothing like Regina George. In fact, she wouldn’t be caught dead in pink, Wednesdays or not. She is a grunge girl who hates posers and isn’t a big fan of the LA Barbie who just dropped in her lap.
And, the reason for the season: Liz, the school’s resident lesbian rocker who makes zines and leans into her nickname: Lizbian. (Bonus: Liz is played by Gabrielle Policano, who is queer in real life.) Liz is the first person Elle meets when she gets to her new school, and when Elle first starts to say hi to her and try to make friends, Liz assumes she’s being pranked. She asks Elle if Kimberly put her up to it, but no, it’s just Elle’s cheerfulness and inability to see someone as a loner through her rose-colored glasses.
Liz is a great character, too. She’s a lesbian, yes, but she’s also someone who cares about music, who has to have a job because she lives with her single mom, who can’t bring herself to be mean to Elle because it would be like kicking a puppy. She’s confused by Elle, but she reluctantly lets her in until all of a sudden she realizes she cares about this stranger from a strange, pink land enough to help her with her schemes and plans. It also becomes clear that she and Kimberly used to be closer than they seem to be at the start of Junior Year, not unlike Janice Ian and Regina George, and that subplot unfolds slowly and in a really satisfying way.
One thing I really loved about Liz and her storyline is that homophobia isn’t a main concern of hers. Even though it takes place in the ’90s, Liz isn’t openly bullied for being a lesbian—and even people who she isn’t friends with call her Lizbian with neutrality. At first, it seems like it might be a contributing factor to why she’s a loner, but we learn it has more to do with her fear of abandonment from her father leaving when she was little than anything else. The rest of the school seems to have neutral-to-positive opinions about her, her zines, and her band. While the show doesn’t pretend homophobia doesn’t exist in the world, we never have to see the queer characters on this show openly bullied or harassed about it, and I found that really refreshing.
Overall, I really enjoyed this show. Like I said, way more than I expected to. It’s wholesome and sweet. And funny! It’s not your typical teen drama; when Liz tells Elle about all the cliques in the school, they do the classic teen movie pan to each table…but the thing is, in this school, everyone is wearing black and grey hoodies and flannel. The groups are indistinguishable from each other, from the popular girls to the stoners to the drama kids.
As a ’90s kid myself, I loved all the music. There is also a fun Breakfast Club-themed episode and plenty of references of the original movie. Bruiser’s origin story, Elle’s classic pink fuzzy pen, a sneaky “gay or European” joke when Elle’s mom is talking to the gay men who live across the street and are her new best friends—even the episode titles are all quotes from the movie. I especially love that you can see that Elle always had an inner lawyer: in her ability to problem solve, put puzzle pieces together, argue her point, and, especially, in her stick-to-itiveness and her quest for justice. You can even see how her three-point-plans for her life and a dash of boy-focus might eventually lead her to follow a man across the country to Harvard Law.
This show has already been renewed for a second season. The first set up the next season perfectly, and while I don’t know how they would go much further beyond that if they keep up the clip of one whole school year per season, I’m glad for at least a little more. It might not line up with the Legally Blonde lore plotwise, but thematically it’s a perfect fit.
