‘Get more joy!’ believe in yourself!’ Legally Blonde is back – as a life-affirming TV series | television

IIf there’s a young adult romance on TV, we millennial women will watch it. Throw in a love triangle or an emotionally available hockey player for an open conversation about consent, and you’ve got a recipe for a cultural phenomenon. Cover it with childhood nostalgia and serve it to us every summer until our inner teenager explodes.

Dramas centered around teenage girls have taken the year 2026 by storm, with love stories reminiscent of Taylor Swift leaving viewers mesmerized by boys half their age. The likes of the hockey romance Off Campus or the poetically charming drama Every year after, take a thrilling soundtrack and add some of the pain of adulthood, friendship drama, and relationship dilemmas.

Last summer, 25 million viewers tuned in to see how a love triangle between two brothers developed, with The Summer I Turned Pretty attracting huge numbers for the first two episodes of its third and final season. The New York Times reported that the audience for this adaptation of Jenny Hahn’s best-selling novel was mostly made up of women between the ages of 25 and 55 — not quite the “young adult” that Hahn’s readers categorize her as.

Girls’ cult classic Legally Blonde is the latest to get the teen treatment. The new prequel series set in the ’90s follows Elle Woods as a junior in high school to celebrate the film’s 25th anniversary. Washed from head to toe in pink that Barbie would be proud of, Elle begins with a sense of continuity. The film begins with a beautiful, lavish sixteenth birthday party, a world where the school features super-chic girl groups, cute car phones, enviable wardrobes, and ridiculously attractive boys.

At the age of sixteen, Elle Woods (played by relatively unknown actress Lexi Minetree) declares that she “knows exactly who she is and what she wants.” Five-year plan? Rank. Perfect first kiss? It lays the foundation. Her friendships? Everything is ready. With the adolescent naïveté of living in ignorance of the reality of womanhood, Elle thrives in the safe, stable bubble of her childhood. That is, until her father botches a high-profile rhinoplasty and moves the family to perpetually gray Seattle. Elle, who loves colour, California charm and lively small talk, has been banished from the house of her Barbie dreams into a world full of hoodies, advocates for social justice and an intense hatred of blonde girls who think “pink is a personality.”

The show’s existence is credited to the original Elle Woods – Reese Witherspoon. She felt that “the world could use a little Elle Woods” — all that determination and positivity — and her vision for the character helped the creative team build the show.

“It’s always fun to explore life as a teenager,” says Lauren Neustadter, head of film and television at Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. “We’ve all been there.”

However, not everyone’s teenage years were like this. Elle’s ’90s and 2000s nostalgia isn’t just limited to miniskirts, T-shirts, and car phones. It’s also a reminder of a childhood before the digital age — no red pill culture, social media, or concerns about explicit photos circulating online. Elle takes us back to a simpler, carefree time of crushes on the popular kid, large friendship groups, and the security of knowing that everything will work out in the end.

“How wonderful it would be if we could all come back and say [to our teenage self] “It’ll be fine.” Get more joy here. “Believe in yourself,” says executive producer Caroline Dries. “This is our way of doing it.”

Reconnecting with that time isn’t just fun for millennial viewers — the writers felt the same way. “When we were doing it, we were remembering all those key moments in our high school experience,” Dries says. “It just shows how important that period was in our lives.”

As much as Legally Blonde was the touchstone for this project, creator Laura Kittrell also drew from her own teen TV obsession, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hoping to emulate “the specific tone of real teen stakes, but also have a lot of comedy and be the ultimate fish out of water.” I also took inspiration from 2000s classics like 10 Things I Hate About You, 90210, and Mean Girls (“[it’s] Always in my heart.”

“High school is all about firsts,” says Kittrell, “and now that we know who Elle Woods has become, it’s fun to watch her experience those first times. First kiss, first crush, first love. We were really inspired by a moment in the movie when Elle shows up to the party and she’s dressed as a bunny and she walks in and there’s a moment of slight embarrassment and then she gets over it quickly. We were thinking, how did she gain the confidence to focus so quickly on a dime like we wanted to recreate the first time that happened where she felt more embarrassed.”

As our favorite inspirational Harvard lawyer suffers from a related identity crisis, reassurance is woven into the series to combat the overwhelming pressure viewers feel to make sense of it all. Sure, we can’t come home from school and solve everything in our mother’s arms anymore, but Kittrell hopes Elle’s journey will affirm to girls and women “that you’re not alone, everyone feels this way, and it’s okay to feel this way.”

The problems of teenage girls are often dealt with in a way that belittles them, ignores them, or completely removes them from the narrative. But the fallout from the friendship, the early period, and the awkward encounters with the boys are uncomfortable and heartbreaking experiences — which Elle’s creators feel deserve to be acknowledged.

“There are a lot of teen shows that are heavily promoted, so there’s definitely a place for that,” Kittrell says. “For us, it was always important that the issues Elle faces were real teenage issues, because these are things we can relate to, but they also need to be given the weight they deserve.”

Created as a “love letter to the next generation” of girls, Elle is also a love letter to the young creator’s personality, and to all the millennials who have lived and loved the humor, heart, and validation that these iconic teen movies gave them. “If I could live again [girlhood] “With this lens of confidence that I have now, when I was a kid, would I be a different person?” she says of a question she wrestled with: “Wouldn’t I have had those struggles?”

Ultimately, though, the show is more than just a feel-good escape. It’s rooted in an inspiring message. “The way Reese [as Elle] Convinced women to become lawyers? he asks dryly. “Even if it’s just one person, as cliché as that sounds, who feels like their true self, it’s a very moving responsibility.”

These moving tales of girls who overcame the familiar struggles of millennial women make us all feel seen. Maybe they can do something really important. Maybe they can inspire us to reconnect with that younger, less jaded version of us who not only believes in love — but more importantly in ourselves, too.

Elle is on Prime Video on Wednesdays.