Amazon Prime has taken on the daunting task of reviving a much-beloved noughties rom-com. What, like it’s hard? Well, apparently it is.
The reviews are in for Elle, a TV spin-off of the cult classic Legally Blonde – and most of them are brutal.
The Wrap slammed it as “boring and tedious”, the Radio Times said it “should be illegal”, and the Independent declared young people deserve better than the “slop” of “warmed-over revivals”.
Not all critics were so damning, however – the New York Post celebrated Elle as a “sparkling good time” and NME, in a four-star review, calls it a “hot pink delight”.
Set in 1995, the eight-episode first season stars newcomer Lexi Minetree as Elle Woods, a high-school junior.
When her family is forced to flee the blue skies of California for the grey clouds of Seattle after her plastic surgeon father botches a celebrity’s nose job, Elle finds herself in a very different environment as she tries to navigate high school, friendships and romances.
With its neo-feminist message that you can be girly and kind but also shrewd and smart, the original Legally Blonde film was such a cultural reckoning that many of its iconic moments (bend and snap, I’m looking at you) are still referenced today.
The movie catapulted Reese Witherspoon into the Hollywood A-list crowd, and, while she doesn’t star in the revival, she is an executive producer.
‘Half-baked’
While the idea of pretty-in-pink Elle Woods being thrown into the grunge of 90s Seattle is “cute enough on paper”, in reality it feels “thin and forced”, wrote the Wrap’s Marah Eakin.
Legally Blonde was “fun, fresh and brilliantly paced”, she writes, but Elle is “dour, boring and tedious” despite its solid supporting cast, which includes James Van Der Beek in one of his final acting roles.
Eakin also points out the show’s cultural blind spots – Kurt Cobain would have died just one year earlier, yet none of Elle’s Nirvana-loving peers seem to be aware of it.
Similarly, would teenagers in Seattle during the mid-90s have used terms such as “victim-blaming”? Perhaps not, suggested the Radio Times’ Jack Seale.
In his two-star review, Seale took particular aim at the screenwriting, pointing out that while there are moments of “peppy fun”, the scripts seem to be “deliberately half-baked, as if the show isn’t expecting your full attention”.
And maybe that’s true – it’s been widely reported that writers these days are doing so-called “second-screen writing” – effectively dumbing down plots so that viewers can still follow along, while simultaneously scrolling on their phones.
That doesn’t mean that comedy should suffer, with Seale saying that every time a scene could deliver a “killer gag”, instead it was just “gently amusing”.
“There are just so many moments here that could sing, yet they barely murmur,” he wrote.
It is as if the show isn’t even trying to be funny, said Indie Wire’s Ben Travers, because there aren’t many jokes in the show, and the ones that are there are “too tepid”.
Travers also criticised the plot for focusing on “tired teen drama, a pathetic love triangle and a lazy mystery”.
The Independent’s Adam White pointed out that Legally Blonde 3 has been stuck in “development hell” since 2018, so Elle is a “quick fix” that will inevitably make money.
But it is “curiously unfunny” and will “likely leave many watching unsatisfied”, he said.
Yes, there are love triangles, “mean teens” and scandals, he said, but the show is missing the “sheer sharpness of the movie”, making it “an unusually sluggish teen drama”.
All in all? Young people deserve better than “warmed-over revivals missing all of the pep, colour and dazzle of their predecessors”, he concluded.
Giving an A for effort but B- for execution, the Hollywood Reporter’s Angie Han said Elle is “cute enough” but doesn’t make sense.
“Like its own heroine, it feels stuck somewhere between the show it thought it wanted to be and the show it has the potential to become,” she wrote.
In a three-star review, Metro’s Charlotte Minter said said the TV show “won’t hit the sweet spot for diehard fans” and was “lacking in uniqueness to justify being a prequel”.
Collider’s Therese Lacson said the series “can’t really hold a candle to the movie that started it all”.
“Elle seems more like a parody than a true prequel,” she wrote, adding that the series “has heart and humour, but that’s not enough”.
‘A sparkling good time’
While The Hollywood Reporter said Elle is “in no way a fair portrayal” of Seattle, calling it “cheesily stereotypical”, one of the few positive reviews came from the Emerald City itself – The Seattle Times.
“Elle is a cute, funny fish-out-of-water comedy series”, wrote arts critic Moira Macdonald.
Yes, it’s a bit slow and the scene references to Seattle are “mostly nonexistent” because it was filmed in Vancouver, but overall, the “likeable” Elle is worth watching, she added.
In her four-star review, NME’s Vicky Jessop said that “despite the clumsy stereotyping, there is plenty to love about Elle,” describing it as a series that leans on much of the same premise as the original film, “but it’s been gently massaged for a modern day audience”.
And as for the lack of comedy? “The gentle humour is all part of this show’s charm,” she wrote.
Lauren Sarner of the New York Post also gave a positive review, saying the show is “fun, energetic and hits all the right notes” and is “a rare case of a prequel that doesn’t tarnish the original”.
She also felt the show is “nothing if not committed to the time period” with the 90s soundtrack and references to era-specific things like Blockbuster and rich kids coming from “Microsoft money”.
Yes, it has some cliches and far too much product placement, but “against all odds” it is a “sparkling good time”.
“Ultimately, those who can get past the pilot and the canon problems will be rewarded with a lighthearted, bingeable series,” said Screen Rant’s Liz Hersey.
This was Lexi Minetree’s first major acting role, and her performance has been applauded by critics – in particular, her ability to impersonate Witherspoon’s Elle Woods, which The New York post described as “astoundingly good”.
Minetree has “cracking comic timing”, the Independent said, but appeared to be “hemmed in by the Reese Witherspoon impression she’s presumably been told to do”.
Those skills are “impressive enough on a technical level and likeable enough on an emotional one to have you wishing Minetree had actually been allowed to make the role her own,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote.
The negative reviews perhaps shouldn’t be seen as an indicator of how Elle will be received by viewers, many of whom just want some easy-watching escapism.
When Emily in Paris was first released in 2020, it was so brutally criticised that writer and executive producer Darren Star had to publicly defend it.
Now making its sixth (and final) season, the show has an unashamedly loyal fanbase, who would follow Emily anywhere.
So Elle, don’t give up just yet.
Elle will be available to watch on Prime Video on 1 July 2026, and has already been recommissioned for a second season.
