Movies don't get much peppier than Legally Blonde, and characters certainly don't get peppier than Elle Woods, the Harvard Law student Reese Witherspoon brought to life in her noughties classic.
Years before mean girls started wearing pink on Wednesdays, Elle's bubblegum pink persona taught a whole generation to see the best in everyone with unbridled optimism and endless positivity.
As such, you'd expect a prequel show like Elle to do the same, and it does. But the sheen of that platinum blonde smile has lost some of its sparkle, especially when it comes to a rather morbid twist that occurs midway through.
Don't worry though. It's not like Elle has forgotten the essence of who Elle is.
The move towards something a little darker is very deliberate, as proved by Elle's physical move to Seattle at the start of the show.
It rains all the time, as we're reminded by the use of Garbage's classic anthem in the opening credits. 'I'm Only Happy When It Rains' doesn't apply to Elle though, not when she's so used to the sun and glamour of LA.
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The "City that God and Gucci forgot", as Elle puts it, isn't easy to live in. Not at first.
As the birthplace of grunge, '90s Seattle isn't quite ready for the full Elle Woods experience, and her attempts to "get fluent in Seattle" take a lot longer to work than she expects. But work they do, ever so gradually, as Elle proves that there's more to her than the "vapid LA girl" other students take her for.
That's the crux of this first season; Elle's journey to better understand herself and how bubbly optimism can be reconciled with the moodiness of other teens around her. You know, like regular people.
That alone would be an interesting update to the Legally Blonde franchise, modernising Elle's spunk with a bend and snap towards mid '90s melancholy. Because bringing in these elements actually helps ground the story, while further emphasising the resilience one needs to be that peppy.
Yet there's a cliffhanger midway through the season that almost takes this a little too far, and boy is it morbid.
Soon after Elle's new friend Shannon (Danielle Chand) breaks up with her boyfriend Miles (Jacob Moskovitz), the chemistry that's been building between him and Elle leads to a kiss. Being a shiny ball of optimism and do-goodery, Elle immediately feels bad about it, even though Shannon and Miles are no longer together.
Elle's about to feel a whole lot worse though, and so is Shannon, when it's revealed at the end of episode four that Shannon's mother just died in a car accident outside the school.
The news come out of nowhere, as it would in real life, and as such, the tone immediately shifts from teen comedy to one of guilt and mourning.
While Legally Blonde revolved around Elle's work on a murder trial, the death itself was hardly something to cry over. Here though, a lot of tears are shed, especially at the memorial that Elle helps organise (at a local Rainforest Cafe!!) out of guilt.
That she did so by calling 150 times with different voices to get everyone needed on the guest list is very "Elle", even if these circumstances are not.
Things take an even worse turn, for Elle, that is, when Miles admits to Shannon that he kissed Elle. Soon after, Elle's former new bestie flies off to Denver, eager to escape the place where both her mum died and her friend betrayed her.
What might have felt out of place in the films actually works quite well here, even if the extremity of this twist was a little unexpected.
Elle's struggle with guilt leads her to rally for a stop sign to be placed where Shannon's mum died, and in doing so, she uncovers a wider conspiracy that lays the groundwork for who Elle will eventually become in the Legally Blonde movies.
While the original film script was actually supposed to be more adult and "raunchier" than what we ended up with, it still comes as a surprise to see Elle contend with mortality in the prequel.
Perhaps this move was inspired in part by Wednesday, arguably the most successful prequel show released this decade.
While the gothic tone of the Addams Family spinoff is obviously absent here, Witherspoon has said (via The Hollywood Reporter) that she actually got the idea for Elle by watching Wednesday. The difference is that Netflix lightened things up for its prequel, while Prime Video went the opposite way and conceived of something a little darker for Elle.
Still, that doesn't mean this version of everyone's favourite law student is unrecognisable here. Elle's unbridled optimism and endless positivity remain intact, as do her love of all things pink.
It's just that the world Elle moves through now is a little greyer, a little cloudier, if you will. And Elle herself is a little different too, a bit more fleshed out this time around.
By the end of this first season, she's even a teensy bit happy when it rains.
Elle: From the World of Legally Blonde is now available to stream on Prime Video.
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After teaching in England and South Korea, David turned to writing in Germany, where he covered everything from superhero movies to the Berlin Film Festival.
In 2019, David moved to London to join Digital Spy, where he could indulge his love of comics, horror and LGBTQ+ storytelling as Deputy TV Editor, and later, as Acting TV Editor.
David has spoken on numerous LGBTQ+ panels to discuss queer representation and in 2020, he created the Rainbow Crew interview series, which celebrates LGBTQ+ talent on both sides of the camera via video content and longform reads.
Beyond that, David has interviewed all your faves, including Henry Cavill, Pedro Pascal, Olivia Colman, Patrick Stewart, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Dornan, Regina King, and more — not to mention countless Drag Race legends.
As a freelance entertainment journalist, David has bylines across a range of publications including Empire Online, Radio Times, INTO, Highsnobiety, Den of Geek, The Digital Fix and Sight & Sound.
