It’s 25 years since you became a bona fide film star. In the intervening quarter of a century you have stayed a respected actor and become a powerhouse producer. An appetite grows for teen-led dramas that for reasons of nostalgia or muscled ice-hockey players appeal to the generation or two above. You are Reese Witherspoon. What do you do?Take down the Legally Blonde IP, dust it off and make a small-screen prequel to the box office hit that became a cult classic, of course! You maximise your chances of success by casting a charismatic mini-me (Lexi Minetree) who can capture all the sassiness and sweetness of the original protagonist, Elle Woods, and recreate the genius of your own performance by making her un-self-aware without being imbecilic.This time, you make her a high school student rather than graduate/Harvard freshman, and you retool the fish-out-of-water tale by forcing her out of her Bel Air bubble (courtesy of a botched celebrity nose job by her father, requiring them to get out of town) and relocating her to grungy Seattle (and, as we are in the mid-90s, there is nowhere grungier) where she will have to make new friends at a new school full of mean girls and boys who assure her that “pink is not a personality”. You hope this is enough to make it feel new and not enough to scare away any of the fans you hope – I mean, look at Greta Gerwig’s Barbie! – will come flocking to relive the bubble gum-magic of yesteryear. You call it Elle and put out eight episodes on Prime Video. What, like it’s hard?Well, perhaps it’s a bit harder than anyone thought. Elle opens well, with Elle’s 16th birthday celebrations at the family mansion, attended by her many friends, as they look forward to life as high school juniors thanks to Elle’s plans to manage the complex social politics, secure the perfect first kiss with Hot Josh and stay on top of all the plot twists in Days of Our Lives.Alas, the best laid plans are scuppered by the nasal-botching and off the Woods must go to live in the US’s rainiest city. They may be down, however, but they are not out. Irrepressible optimism, thy name is Woods. So while dad Wyatt (Tom Everett Scott) gets on with making the best of his new job at a tiny firm unfrequented by Hollywood types and mum Eva (June Diane Raphael) reworks their rental’s decor into something more fabulous, Elle meets and greets her new peers. “I have two subscriptions to Cosmo – one for my archive, one I can crease. I like ice coffees, the month of July and when people dress kind of tennis-y even when they don’t play tennis!” It does not work.Not for Elle and, alas, not for the viewer. The camp effervescence on which much of the success of the film depended quickly dissipates. The new aesthetic – the screen fills with sludgy browns, greys and camo-plaid combos over band T-shirts – is depressing to look at (and TV is a visual medium, so yes, it does matter) and the new characters are bland at best and, at worst, so humourlessly proto-woke that you begin to hate some of them on sight.And the script takes a hit. Soon it is leaning heavily on the most basic of high school comedy set-pieces and tropes – the mean girl (with a secret), the love triangle, the new best friend with whom our heroine has nothing in common, the good deeds backfiring, the social faux pas (in a callback to the lawyers’ mixer in Legally Blonde, Elle arrives humiliatingly underdressed to an event), the anonymous insults scrawled on a locker – and so on, without any fresh twists or enough killer lines to go with them. Though I did enjoy Elle’s despair at LA gal pal Madison’s advice that the best way to stage a comeback after social death is to have a kid or go on SNL. “But I’m a virgin!” cries Elle. “And I can’t wait till Saturday!”Thanks mainly to the Woods family’s closeness (and two immaculate and generous comic performances from the two adult actors flanking Minetree) Elle has enough charm to get by. In a world that needs all the harmless escapism it can get, Elle gets the job done. But it could, given its pedigree and its writing at the peaks, have been so much more. It’s bend and SNAP, not give up halfway.