‘Legally Blonde’ Prequel Series ‘Elle’ Is Often Well-Executed, if Mostly a Rehash: TV Review
Variety | 01.07.2026 20:15
The Amazon Prime Video show “Elle” is billed as a prequel series to the 2001 novel turned hit movie “Legally Blonde,” but its eight episodes play more like a remake. Sure, “Elle” turns back the clock to 1995, when its title character — the bubbly, pink-obsessed lawyer-to-be made iconic by a young Reese Witherspoon — was a rising junior at Beverly Hills High. Yet the arc of “Elle” hews so closely to the trajectory our heroine takes in the original film that it’s hard to believe one person underwent the same maturation process twice over, unless she entered Harvard Law with a bad case of amnesia. Better, then, to view “Elle” as a kind of alternate universe tale where Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree) simply had her epiphanies a few years earlier. That way, it’s easier to appreciate what this bildungsroman does well, which is a fair amount.
