Prime Video's new YA series Elle asks a question that literally no fan of the Legally Blonde films has ever asked: What was Elle Woods' life like before the events of the first movie? This is unfortunately not unusual in the age of IP above all else. Sequels and prequels and spinoffs don't exist because they're creatively necessary, but because they represent an opportunity to make more money off of a familiar brand name.
But Elle represents a particularly frustrating strain of this disease. Because its answer to its central question basically makes the plot of Legally Blonde impossible. It's an attempt to exploit a familiar property that then renders that property moot.
Let's refresh. In 2001, Reese Witherspoon played Elle, benevolent queen of her SoCal college kingdom. She is smart and kind, but also very specific in her interests and blind to how the world outside her world might view her. So she's stunned when her boyfriend Warren, heir to a political dynasty, dumps her because he doesn't think she's serious enough to be the wife of a future senator. Desperate to change his mind, she follows him to Harvard Law, and is unprepared for her new peers to assume she's dumb and shallow. Determined to prove that she's tougher and more clever than everyone thinks, she wins a big legal case, makes an army of new friends, and realizes that Warner is a loser who never deserved her. A satisfying character arc with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and one that turned Witherspoon from a promising young talent into a superstar.
To paraphrase another movie from 2001, everyone knows Elle had to wait until she went to law school to have all these epiphanies. What Elle presupposes is... maybe she didn't?