Next month marks the 25th anniversary of Legally Blonde, the hit comedy that made Reese Witherspoon a bankable movie star* and, I think, laid the early groundwork for the existence of Barbie. To honor this occasion, Witherspoon and the rest of her cast did an event in L.A. and, well, there is also the release of Elle (July 1), an Amazon original series about a Frenchwoman who is turned on by rape scenarios. Wait, no, sorry, that’s the other Elle. This one is about the teenage years of Witherspoon’s character, the sorta ditzy but surprisingly perspicacious Elle Woods. 

We certainly don’t need this show, just as we didn’t need Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. (Remember that one? Of course you do, because who wasn’t dying to know the backstory of side characters from a 50-year-old musical?) Elle is a charming creation, but her major life growth happens in Legally Blonde, so presumably a prequel story would have to be about her as the Elle from the beginning of the movie, existing unchanged until she heads to the East Coast. 

Except, I guess, Amazon and creator Laura Kittrell figured that wasn’t quite enough juice to sustain a whole series. So, they have given Elle a mild high school adventure, in which her comfy life in Los Angeles is disrupted by a sudden move to Seattle, where her plastic surgeon father (Tom Everett Scott) is hiding out while a scandal involving a celebrity’s botched nose job blows over. It’s 1995 and chipper, pink-clad Elle doesn’t really fit in in the epicenter of grunge. (Though, really, in 1995 that was already starting to fade, wasn’t it?) We of course know that she will eventually return to California before heading to Boston (reader: is that a fate worse than moving to Seattle?) so this is just a brief interim digression in the life of the someday lawyer. 

Some questions are immediately raised by this conceit. I suppose Elle needn’t have mentioned her time in Seattle in Legally Blonde, but maybe she would have been more inured to being a fish out of water when she gets to Harvard, because she’d lived through something like it before? She might even say to, I dunno, Jennifer Coolidge’s character something to the effect of, “This is just like when I moved to Seattle when I was 16!” But, she doesn’t say that in the movie, because at the time of the film’s making no one, not even Reese Witherspoon, knew that Elle had lived in the Pacific Northwest for a while. 

One also wonders why Elle’s stint in Rain City didn’t have any kind of real lasting effect. Elle is super Californian when we meet her in the 2001 film, so I guess the end result of this show’s narrative is that she simply reverts back to who she was before it all started? Which undermines the potential impact of the series more than a little. 

That said, I’ve seen three episodes, and you know what? It’s pretty cute!