Addressing the Fan Backlash
The production team behind the new series Elle is opening up about the apprehension surrounding the announcement of a Legally Blonde prequel. In an exclusive conversation, showrunners Laura Kittrell and Caroline Dries, alongside executive producer Lauren Neustadter, addressed the initial wave of social media criticism regarding the decision to portray the iconic Elle Woods as a teenager.
“Nobody was worried about it more than us,” Kittrell admitted, noting that the intensity of the online reaction was a primary concern during the development process. The team emphasized that their goal was to create a series that felt authentic to the original material while standing on its own.
Striking the Right Balance
The creative team focused heavily on ensuring the show could cater to both long-time devotees and newcomers. “We tried really hard to strike a balance,” Kittrell explained. “If you’re a fan of the movie, you’re going to watch this and get what you want as a fan of the movie. If you have never watched this movie in your life or even heard of it, you will also totally find something to connect to in it.”
According to Neustadter, the original film served as a constant guidepost throughout production: “We really wanted to honor the movie. We are all fans. We always think about the fans and I think staying really tightly tied to that original movie was an incredibly important thing and always really our north star.”
Expanding the Narrative
The prequel, which explores Elle’s formative years in high school before her time at Harvard Law, aims to provide depth to the character viewers first met in the 2001 classic. Kittrell highlighted that the writing room’s intent was to enrich the established story rather than reinvent it: “We wanted to add something else to the canon and not create our own new canon.”
Transitioning from a two-hour film to an eight-episode series presented unique challenges in terms of tone and pacing. Dries elaborated on the creative process:
“It was about keeping the world of Elle feeling heightened but the world kind of feeling grounded around her. But it is also sustaining that for eight episodes. So for eight hours of TV, you can’t be up here the whole time. It’s really about finding these emotional stories that bring us to an emotional bottom for all the characters and finding the balance so we get without getting overly sentimental.”
Elle is currently available for streaming on Prime Video.