Review: With 'Elle,' don't think twice about 'Legally Blonde.' You'll still have a good time

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred Advertised as “from the world of ‘Legally Blonde,’” the new Prime Video series “Elle” revisits that film’s heroine, Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree), as a 16-year-old high school student, suddenly transported from Beverly Hills to Seattle after her plastic surgeon father (Tom Everett Scott) botches a nose job and has to lie low.Set in 1995, six years before the events of the first “Legally Blonde” film, with Seattle still living through the long tail of first-wave grunge — Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell are mentioned almost in a single breath — it shares with the big-screen mothership only its indomitable protagonist, who loves pink and her Chihuahua, Bruiser.(The dog gets its own origin story: It was “rescued” from the Spellings, as in Aaron, who found that its “earth tones” didn’t match “their new color palette.”)There’s a passing reference to the lawyer Elle might (and does) become, and surely some things I missed, but if you’ve never seen “Legally Blonde,” you will not be at any particular disadvantage.

(Possibly you will be at a disadvantage if you have seen it.) Bruiser aside, nothing that happens here affects what happens there.Don’t think twice, or even once, about canon.

This is something else entirely.What that is is a high school comedy, which is to say it’s full of familiar characters swept up in teenage drama.And because this is an eight-episode series and not a two-hour movie, relationships will shift more than once.

Indeed, they will not be done shifting by the season’s end; a second is clearly in the producers’ sights.Floating into her new school on a bubble of positivity that will stubbornly refuse to burst, Elle is a spot of color in a sea of black and plaid.(There’s a joke that all the cliques — “jocks, D&D nerds, st...