If there’s a younger grownup romance on TV, we millennial girls will watch it. Throw in a love triangle or an emotionally out there hockey participant having an open dialog about consent, and also you’ve acquired your self a recipe for a cultural phenomenon. Cowl it in girlhood nostalgia and serve it to us each summer time for our inside teenager to swoon over.
Teen girl-centric dramas have taken streamers by storm in 2026, with love tales harking back to a Taylor Swift track that go away viewers smitten for boys half their age. The likes of hockey romance Off Campus or poetically charming drama Each 12 months After take a sensational soundtrack and add some coming-of-age pains, friendship dramas and relationship dilemmas.
Final summer time, 25 million viewers tuned in to see how a love triangle involving two brothers performed out, with The Summer season I Turned Fairly drawing large numbers to the primary two episodes of its third and closing season. The New York Occasions reported that the viewers for this adaptation of Jenny Han’s best-selling novel was predominantly made up of ladies age 25-55 – not fairly the “younger adults” Han’s readership is categorised as.
Lady-coded cult basic Legally Blonde is the most recent to get the teenage therapy. Its new 90s-set prequel sequence follows Elle Woods as a junior in highschool to mark the movie’s twenty fifth anniversary. Elle begins because it means to go on, washed head to toe in a pink that Barbie could be pleased with. Opening with a lavish candy sixteen birthday bash, it’s a world the place college options ultra-stylish woman teams, cute automobile telephones, enviable walk-in wardrobes and ridiculously engaging boys.
At 16, Elle Woods (performed by comparatively unknown actor Lexi Minetree) declares that she “is aware of precisely who she is and what she needs.” A five-year-plan? Sorted. An ideal first kiss? She’s laying the groundwork. Her friendships? All set. With that teenage naivety of residing in ignorance of the truth of womanhood, Elle is flourishing in her protected, regular bubble of girlhood. That’s till her dad botches a high-profile nostril job and relocates the household to the ever-grey Twilight-esque metropolis of Seattle. A devotee of color, California attraction and peppy small speak, Elle is thrown from her Barbie dreamhouse right into a world full of hoodies, requires social justice and a robust dislike of blond women who assume “pink is a persona”.
The present owes its existence to the unique Elle Woods – Reese Witherspoon. She felt that “the world might use somewhat Elle Woods” – all that dedication and positivity – and her insights into the character helped the inventive workforce to construct the present.
“It’s all the time enjoyable to discover life as a youngster,” says Lauren Neustadter, president of movie and tv at Witherspoon’s firm, Good day Sunshine. “We’ve all been there.”
Not everybody’s teen years had been like this, although. Elle’s 90s and Y2K nostalgia isn’t nearly miniskirts, child tees and automobile telephones. It’s additionally a reminder of girlhood earlier than the digital age – no pink tablet tradition, social media or worries about specific pictures being circulated on-line. Elle transports us again to an easier, carefree time of all-consuming crushes on the favored child, massive friendship teams and the protection of realizing that all the pieces will work out ultimately.
“How nice would it not be if we might all return and say [to our teenage self] ‘it’s going to be OK. Have extra pleasure right here. Imagine in your self’?”, says govt producer Caroline Dries. “That is our approach of doing that.”
Reconnecting with that point isn’t only a pleasure for millennial viewers – the writers felt the identical approach. “After we had been making it, we had been remembering all of these core moments of our highschool expertise,” says Dries. “It simply exhibits how monumental that point in our lives was.”
As a lot as Legally Blonde was the touchstone for this challenge, creator Laura Kittrell additionally drew from her personal teenage TV obsession, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hoping to emulate the “particular tone of actual teenage stakes, but additionally having a lot comedy and being the last word fish out of water”. She additionally took inspiration from 2000s classics like 10 Issues I Hate About You, 90210 and Imply Women (“[it’s] all the time in my coronary heart”).
“Highschool is all about firsts,” Kittrell says, “so now that we all know who Elle Woods turns into, it’s enjoyable to observe her expertise these first occasions. The primary kiss, first crush, past love. We had been actually impressed by a second within the film when Elle exhibits as much as the social gathering sporting the bunny costume and he or she walks in and there’s a second of slight embarrassment then she rapidly will get over it. We had been considering, how did she have the arrogance to so rapidly pivot on a dime like that? We wished to recreate the primary time that ever occurred the place she did really feel extra embarrassment.”
As our favorite inspirational will-be Harvard lawyer struggles by means of a relatable identification disaster, reassurance is laced into the sequence to fight the immense stress viewers really feel to have all the pieces discovered. Certain, we will’t come residence from college and have all the pieces solved with a hug from our mum any extra however Kittrell hopes that Elle’s journey emphasises to women and girls that “you’re not alone, everybody feels this and it’s OK to really feel this fashion.”
Teenage women’ issues are sometimes handled in a approach that disparages them, dismisses them – or completely removes them from the narrative. However friendship fallouts, the primary interval, awkward encounters with boys are uncomfortable and heartbreaking experiences – which the creators of Elle really feel need to be acknowledged.
“Lots of teenage exhibits are very heightened, and there’s actually a spot for that,” says Kittrell. “For us, it was all the time essential that the issues Elle is dealing with are actual teenage issues, as these are issues we will relate to, but additionally must be given the burden they deserve.”
Crafted as a “love letter to the subsequent technology” of ladies, Elle can be a love letter to the creator’s younger self, and all millennials who lived and liked the humour, coronary heart and validation that these iconic teen woman films gave them. “If I might relive [girlhood] by means of this lens of the arrogance that I’ve now, as a child, would I be a distinct individual?”, says Dries of a query she has wrestled with. “Would I’ve not gone by means of these struggles?”
In the end, although, the present is extra than simply feelgood escapism. It’s rooted in an inspirational message. “The best way that Reese [as Elle] satisfied girls to develop into legal professionals?” asks Dries. “Even when it’s only one individual, as tacky as this sounds, who seems like being her genuine self, it’s a fairly transferring duty.”
These stirring tales of ladies overcoming acquainted struggles that millennial girls lived by means of make us all really feel seen. Possibly they will do one thing actually essential. Maybe they will encourage us to reconnect with that youthful, much less jaded model of us who not solely believed in love – however most significantly in ourselves too.
Elle is on Prime Video on Wednesday.
