Elle series review:

Teen soap is a hard genre to sell (and buy) because it thrives in casual conversations between characters. This is especially the case when a film or a series in the genre does not rely on comedy. Take the Legally Blonde prequel, Elle, for instance. Even if you are willing to look beyond the usual genre trappings, Elle starts on an insensitive note. Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree) is forced to leave Los Angeles for a life in Seattle, when her father, Wyatt Woods (Tom Everett Scott), botches up a nose job and wants to escape the legal consequences. The old man and his wife, Eva Woods (June Diane Raphael), convince their daughter to leave LA until people in the city forget about his mistake. The series suggests somewhere that Elle is too young to understand how immoral this is, but we highly doubt it. This is perhaps why it gets quite hard to stay invested in a story that revolves around Elle’s struggles adapting to her new life and high school in Seattle. Each time Elle talks about her difficulty fitting into her school society, it comes across as a mere complaint rather than a genuine concern.

Elle’s school mates keep ignoring her partly because she does not have qualities like them, leaving her with very few options when it comes to winning them back. It does not help the series that we know Elle is a coming-of-age story, setting the foundation for the grown-up Woods (Reese Witherspoon) we see in Legally Blonde. And as with any coming-of-age story, it is easy to tell that the protagonist will eventually win over everyone and become the darling of Seattle. The key, then, lies on the part of how she will earn the trust and loyalty of everyone at Rainier West High School. Unfortunately, this angle is too casual and generic to evoke any real interest in the story. The stakes here are really low for an eight episode-long series.

The series draws much of the tension and excitement, whatever little there may be, from Elle’s struggles in Seattle. It is funny how the protagonist’s assumption about why she is unpopular at her new school applies to our own perception of the character and by extension the series. At one point, Elle tells her mother that maybe her mates do not like her because she is vapid. The world of Seattle is too real for Elle to work her pink magic. The series constantly throws a shade on the character, right from how her taste in fashion does not lend itself nicely to the Seattle grunge scene to how she makes everything around her life about herself. Funnily enough, the series does very little to convince us otherwise. By the end, we find ourselves asking: ‘Is Elle worth caring for?’ Each time she does something apparently nice or makes an interesting point, Elle undoes it with an insensitive move here, a narcissistic move there (somewhere, this is also a storytelling flaw). For example, we find it relatable when Elle tells her friend Madison (Jessica Belkin) that she misses earthquakes in LA, suggesting that her headaches in Seattle far outweigh them. However, she soon reverts back to her stereotypical self.

For instance, when she goes back to LA for an internship at Cosmopolitan, it forces her mother to act as her chaperone, and at an event, she ends up confronting the woman for whom her husband gave a bad nose job. Eva Woods initially tries to pin the blame on the female client herself and diffuse the situation. Meanwhile, Elle tells her that they should face their life problems head on and stop evading these, only to immediately suggest going back to Seattle as their only recourse. It is not like the series does not understand this hypocritical contradiction. It is self-aware enough, and part of the point is also about how Elle is very much a product of her mother. Likewise, the series devotes much of its time on how Elle solves an issue with a school secretary named Donna (Amy Pietz). Here, too, the emphasis is on how she fixes the problem, which means the secretary ends up having very little say in the proceedings. It does not help Elle’s cause that the story constantly centers her perspective at the expense of everyone else. With such plot points, the show makes it really hard for the audience to bother about its high society elitism.

The only redeemable quality, if there is any, is the acting. Lexi Minetree is an apt successor for Witherspoon as the sprightly Elle Woods, even though she does not quite have the latter’s star power to rise over the generic material. Some of her mannerisms and behaviour come across as mere mimicry of Witherspoon’s Woods and the writing keeps her a mere type throughout, but the actor does a fine job of channeling her character’s insecurities and fears. Raphael and Scott portray their characters, as Elle’s parents, as convincingly as possible, and Gabrielle Policano offers a sense of realism as Elle’s friend, Liz, in the series’ uncompromising poshness.

All said and done, much like the titular character, Elle fails to justify its own existence. By the time you finish watching all eight episodes, there is a good chance that you will forget the story of Legally Blonde. Talk about ruining a legacy. The meandering series lacks the unapologetic camp factor and the razor-sharp pacing of the original. It is a pity that the makers greenlit the series where a tight prequel film would have sufficed for a blatant cash-grab.