Billed as “from the world of 'Legally Blonde,'” Prime Video's new series “Elle” revisits that film's heroine, Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree), as a 16-year-old high school student, suddenly transported from Beverly Hills to Seattle after her plastic surgeon father (Tom Everett Scott) botches a nose job and has to lie low.
Set in 1995, six years before the events of the first “Legally Blonde” film, with Seattle still experiencing the long tail of the first grunge wave (Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell are mentioned almost in unison), it shares with the big screen mothership only its indomitable protagonist, who loves pink and his chihuahua, Bruiser. (The dog has his own origin story: he was “rescued” from the Spellings, as in the case of Aaron, who discovered that his “earth tones” did not match “his new color palette.”)
There's a passing reference to the lawyer Elle could be (and is), and I'm sure I missed a few things, but if you've never seen “Legally Blonde,” you won't be at any particular disadvantage. (You may be at a disadvantage if have I've seen it.) Bruiser aside, nothing that happens here affects what happens there. Don't think twice, not even once, about canon. This is something completely different.
What it is is a high school comedy, meaning it's full of familiar characters wrapped up in a teen drama. And since this is an eight-episode series and not a two-hour movie, relationships will change more than once. In fact, they won't be done changing by the end of the season; a second is clearly in the producers' sights.
The series is a fish-out-of-water story as Elle moves from Beverly Hills to Seattle. From left, Kimberly (Chandler Kinney), Liz (Gabrielle Policano), Elle (Lexi Minetree), Miles (Jacob Moskovitz) and Dustin (Zac Looker).
(Kimberley French / Prime Video)
Floating to her new school in a bubble of positivity that will stubbornly refuse to burst, Elle is a speck of color in a sea of black and plaid. (There's a joke that all the cliques – “jocks, D&D nerds, stoners, kids with parents with Microsoft money, kids with parents with Boeing money” – dress exactly the same.) Her surface merges with her substance, Kimberley (Chandler Kinney), the bad queen bee, mocks her in a reversal of the usual dynamic; They are the supposedly deep and authentic characters who look down on the privileged and apparently superficial. (Not understanding that Bikini Kill is a band, Elle will say, “Bikini Kill? I know bikinis… that kill.”) Introducing himself to the skeptical Liz (Gabrielle Policano), who makes music and works in a record store, he says, “I like iced coffee, the month of July, and when people dress like tennis, even when they don't play tennis.”
At the same time, Elle quickly teams up with Shannon (Danielle Chand), the school's self-proclaimed one-man welcoming committee, and Miles (Jacob Moskovitz), a central casting good guy who literally crashes into her, as is traditional. (His jacket is blue denim to differentiate him). It will take a second longer for the almost outsider and socially conscious Dustin (Zac Looker) to influence. Inevitably, everything will fall before his kindness, his school spirit, and his No Doubt karaoke, although his good intentions will also have unintended consequences and he will have things to learn: it's a fish-out-of-water story where the water will change the fish and the fish will change the water. In a late-season plot, to give them something to think about besides each other, they will become the Scooby Gang (with explicit references to “The Breakfast Club”), investigating adult shenanigans. Well, we love Scooby Gang.
Chief among the adults is Elle's equally blonde mother, Eva (June Diane Raphael), who will become involved in James Van Der Beek's (late) Dean Wilson's mayoral campaign. At the school, there's prickly Principal Anderson (Matt Oberg) and Donna (Amy Pietz, a delight to watch), his kind-hearted secretary, an advocate for needy teens, and, as will be revealed, Liz's mother. It feels wrong to burden the lovable Scott, as Elle's father, Wyatt, with a neglectful fugitive plot, as it is (they had to get the family out of Beverly Hills somehow) and just as his character stays hidden, he also disappears, sadly, into the landscape a bit. He has a nice line about meeting someone named Mike McCready, Pearl Jam's guitarist, at a coffee shop and maybe getting together to play, and getting the chance to lead the partygoers through Oasis' “Wonderwall.”
Minetree is a wise choice to play a younger Reese Witherspoon (an executive producer), with a dash of “Clueless” Alicia Silverstone, and the younger cast is likable across the board. Written by Laura Kittrell, “Elle” is light, often obvious and strange, and refreshingly innocent: Elle is waiting for “a perfect first kiss from a perfect boy,” both because of the genre and because of the setting. (As Robyn Hitchcock sang about Seattle in “Viva! Sea-Tac,” “They have the best computers, coffee and smack.”) In some ways, it feels like a show made for those who already want what's being sold, but that's not me, and I had a perfectly good time.
