Elle – the jury’s out on the Legally Blonde prequel

The new Legally Blonde prequel, Elle, opens with a scene that feels uncannily familiar. It’s 1995 and Mariah Carey is blaring as a white open-top BMW pulls up in front of a McMansion hosting a lavish party. Making its way through the revelry in the manicured hand of a guest is an envelope bearing the name Elle, a callback to the original film, in which a very similar card is passed through Elle Woods’s sorority on the day of her supposed engagement.

Amazon Prime Video’s series – made by Hello Sunshine (the production company founded by the original Elle, Reese Witherspoon) – has found an impressive doppelganger in Lexi Minetree, playing the teenage protagonist. The same nasal west coast voice and doe-eyed smiles are deployed to make us underestimate her capabilities. In a speech to the adoring crowd at her sweet 16 pool party, Elle thanks her best friend of “12.5 years” with visible emotion: “I can’t even count the number of times you’ve saved me from overplucking my eyebrows.”

Now, as then, it’s the beginning of a downward spiral. As the future Elle is unduly dumped, so her younger self is forced to move with her family to Seattle (even worse!) to hide after her father botches a celebrity’s nose job in LA. In the drab surroundings of her new school, Elle is mocked by hoodie-wearing peers and long-suffering teachers. In this upside-down, reverse Mean Girls, where the cheerleaders cheer for themselves not the male players (“I think it’s – feminism?” Elle says morosely), she sets about getting a teacher rehired so she can write about it for a Cosmopolitan essay competition that could be her ticket back home.

As a prequel, it strains credulity: if Elle was tested so fundamentally during school and learned to back herself as a result, why would she end up in the same position years later? But as a cynical IP grab that allows us to cycle nostalgically through familiar moments, it works perfectly. Restaging cherished Legally Blonde set pieces, we see chocolates scoffed in bed while moping – Cosmopolitan on hand, airheaded one liners aiming for meme immortality and determined makeup application montages. There’s even the origin story of how her chihuahua Bruiser got his name – barking when handed to her as a puppy.

Also replaying the hits is the fifth and final season of The Bear (Disney+), which returns stylistically and spiritually to the show it started service as. After two seasons that took the heat out of the kitchen and relied heavily on flashbacks, this series returns to a real-time format and lets the characters cook again. The staff change back into the old blue T-shirts from the Original Berf of Chicagoland (misprint their own) after a pipe bursts due to bad weather. Their sandwich-slinging roots are also recognised by the very real possibility that they might have to bail themselves out of a financial mess by franchising the snack food operation.

The series begins after Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) has shockingly handed over the reins to Syd (Ayo Edebiri) and builds agonisingly slowly towards one final service on which the staff believe the fate of their Michelin star rests.

The mood is very much “getting the gang together for one last job” – which suits a show about a group of misfits working against both time and their worst impulses to achieve perfection. “This is The Bear. You did this,” Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) tells her daughter Natalie (Abby Elliott) before the service, in a moment that feels like the show hanging up its apron and deservedly clapping itself on the back. It’s a fitting farewell that makes you pray a prequel isn’t in the works.

The Pitt, which last week concluded its second season on UK HBO Max, at first appeared to be a tribute act for ER fans, made by the same creator as that show and with the same leading man. What has emerged is something far more interesting: a show concerned with a US fractured by wealth inequality, gun violence, drugs and division. Throughout the first season, Dr Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) dealt with a teenager who had overdosed on fentanyl, and a mass shooting. Now he is one final shift away from a planned three-month sabbatical, and as in The Bear, we witness almost every nervous second as it unfolds.

The season ends with brutality and hope, as Robby saves a pregnant woman and delivers her child via caesarean section after she arrives with high blood pressure, an avoidable predicament caused by her belief in the supposed freebirthing movement. It’s a complicated cocktail of emotions: 4 July fireworks burn in the sky as Robby’s would-be replacement, Dr Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), breaks down in her car over her revealed seizure disorder; a threat to her career.

As Robby’s colleague tells him, “Yes, life can suck. It can be unbearable and brutal and ugly and heartbreaking, but it’s also beautiful and hilarious.” In one moment of glorious release, tugging on Gen X heartstrings, we see resident doctors Mel (Taylor Dearden) and Santos (Isa Briones) lose it to Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know in a crappy karaoke bar. The Pitt knows nostalgia cannot cure, but is one hell of a drug.

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