If you take as truth – and you should – that Clueless and Mean Girls are the apex of teen movies from the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, then you could comfortably classify Legally Blonde as second tier.

The 2001 comedy starring Reese Witherspoon has endured in the popular consciousness but the film is more meme-able than it is rewatchable. It’s not without its devotees, but it’s not really a movie that was crying out for a prequel.

And yet, here we are.

Weirdly, this eight-episode first season is pretty disconnected from the films, and it works better if you don’t try too hard to make it fit within the larger narrative because it repeats a lot of similar character arcs that undercuts the films’ heft.

Think of this as more of a reboot than fitting in the same continuity. We find Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree), six years before she took on Harvard law school. She’s just celebrated her 16th birthday and living the dream life in Bel-Air, a ritzy neighbourhood in Los Angeles.

She has Margot Robbie’s Barbie press tour wardrobe and Cher Horowitz’s collection of fluffy pens. The things she’s most thankful for in life are finding her personal scent, learning about sunscreen, and not overplucking her eyebrows, which, hey, it was the 90s, so a big risk.

Her sunny world comes crashing down when her parents Wyatt (Tom Everett Scott) and Eva (a perfectly cast June Diane Raphael) break the news the family is moving to Seattle after a work mishap.

Seattle in 1995 is worlds away from southern California. Grunge still reigns and the kids are uniformly dressed in plaid ranging from charcoal to khaki.

But Elle is unapologetically herself, even if that means persisting with espadrilles in Seattle’s perpetually wet climate. Her new school is named, rather on the nose, Rainier West High.

She doesn’t fit in, everyone dismisses her as an airhead and is told by the school mean girl, Kimberly (Chandler Kinney), that pink is not a personality.

Her attempt at “speaking Seattle”, which in Elle’s world means zhooshing up a Nirvana tee with love heart eyes, goes down badly.

She cannot debate the finer points of Kurt Cobain is better than Eddie Vedder is better than Chris Cornell, and the Cosmo-worshipping Elle doesn’t even know what a zine is.

The idea of plucking a strawberry pink LA girl and dropping her in late-era Seattle grunge is an interesting one, even if it is another shade of the “Elle is out of her element” framing, as it was in the Legally Blonde film when her cheerful optimism clashes with east coast Ivy elitism.

The beats are familiar and over the season, the show follows the broad strokes of the film - Elle eventually wins people over with her good intentions and unbridled positivity, and proves her smarts and determination by unearthing the truth about a conspiracy, in this case, embezzled funds from the school.

The series is slight, unnecessary and forgettable, but it’s generally inoffensive. In other words, it’s mid.

The question remains who is this series for? Is it for those who loved the original films and will delight in seeing Bruiser as a puppy, dressed in little pink outfits or is it for the young adult viewers of today?

Elle is a wholesome teen show and is coded too young for actual adults who were maybe teens around the dawn of the millennium. But it’s also kind of daggy and not cool enough for young people.

Some of the performances are good. Minetree is sympathetic and appealing and her vocal intonation is a dead match for Witherspoon, and her crying face even looks like her predecessor, but those early episodes cast Elle as a caricature more than a person, and it takes a lot of patience to shake off that sketch comedy vibe.

Some of the supporting characters have promise, particularly Raphael as Elle’s mum, and one of Elle’s eventual school friends, skateboarder and crusader Dustin (Zac Looker).

But the show doesn’t do enough or takes too long (the episodes should’ve been shorter and snappier) to make the rest of the ensemble distinct, and leans too heavily into the “everyone is grunge in Seattle” trope.

Yeah, yeah, we get it, all these cool kids who think they’re being alternative are just performing another kind of conformity.

The mid-90s setting, one suspects, was designed to appeal to young and older audiences in different ways but may miss with both when it’s not backed up with better writing.

And that’s not for lack of trying. Oh, boy, the 1990s references don’t stop coming, whether it’s VHS tapes, mentions of Bosnia, My So-Called Life and Tonya Harding, foreshadowing Craig’s List and Amazon, and a character is driving home from watching David Fincher’s Se7en.

There’s a joke about parents with Microsoft or Boeing money which is genuinely a good chuckle, and you can appreciate the texture the series is trying to build when it furnishes rich girl Elle with a Discman but her less well-off friend Liz has a Walkman.

Seattle being the home of grunge and Sub Pop Records means the music budget for this series is insane. There are needle drops of Soundgarden, Veruca Salt, REM, Radiohead, Tori Amos, Mariah Carey, No Doubt, 4 Non Blondes, Annie Lennox and the theme song is Garbage’s Only Happy When it Rains, which was released almost to the day of when Elle starts school in Seattle.

Of course, when the 90s milieu is so effortful, there are also going to be anachronisms – the show is set specifically in the second half of 1995 but Elle mentions Buffy in an essay, and the TV series didn’t premiere until March 1997 (unless she was one of the very, very few people who saw the most definitely non-zeitgeist 1992 movie).

Plus, dad Wyatt leads a group of adults in an acoustic singalong of Wonderwall but the Oasis anthem was only released in the UK in October of that year and didn’t enter the American charts until January 1996. Also, you can see copies of the 1996 movie The Birdcage in the background of a scene in Blockbuster.

OK, that’s being kind of nitpicky, but that’s also what happens when a series doesn’t grab you, and you end being distracted by cross-referencing the authenticity of one of its selling points.

It can feel more like a theme-park attraction with lots of “look over here” than something that feels genuine.

Which is part of the show’s problem on the whole, it just doesn’t feel quite right. But at least no one bends and snaps, we were spared that indignity.

Elle is streaming on Prime Video