2 July 2026
Elle showrunner Laura Kittrell admitted she was “kept up at night” by fears of backlash to the Legally Blonde prequel TV series.
Lexi Minetree as Elle in Legally Blonde prequel series
The spinoff of the 2001 movie stars Lexi Minetree as Elle Woods and June Diane Raphael as her mum, and is streaming now on Prime video.
However, upon the show being announced, fans of the original film took to social media to express their concern, with Laura saying that the initial response meant she was terrified of what would be said when the programme hit the streaming service.
She told Us Weekly: “Nobody was worried about it more than us. That is definitely what kept us up at night.”
Laura went on to insist that she, fellow showrunner Caroline Dries and executive producer Lauren Neustadter had some strict rules to stick to when it came to working on the series.
She added: “We always went back to tone. We always went back to what we emotionally connected to about the movie — just as fans of the movie — and making sure that we had those things down perfectly.
“Then once we were able to firmly establish that, we were getting excited about how we have new characters that we get to introduce to the world and still make it feel like its own thing.
“We tried really hard to strike a balance of 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.”
And producer Lauren agreed that she wanted to “honour the movie” with the new show.
She said: “We really wanted to honour 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.”
While showrunner Caroline added that they wanted to “maintain the fun tone” of the film, continuing: “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. The movie does a great job of that but it’s two hours and now you got to stretch that into eight hours.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.femalefirst.co.uk ’
