The first season of Prime Video’s “Elle” closed with its title character stuck between two boys, two cities and two versions of herself, and the show’s creative team says that tangle was built by design. Speaking with TheWrap, co-showrunners Laura Kittrell and Caroline Dries broke down the finale’s central twist: Elle Woods, played by newcomer Lexi Minetree, gets caught in a kiss with her friend Dustin just as her other love interest, Miles, spots them from across the winter formal.
Dries said the triangle works precisely because neither boy is a villain. “Both guys are really, really nice guys,” she said, contrasting the setup with past shows where a love interest carried darker baggage. She described the dilemma as a deliberate form of torment for the character, arguing that handing Elle two strong options creates more tension than handing her an easy villain to reject.
Kittrell said the show’s real triangle extends beyond romance. From her earliest pitch to Amazon, she conceived the series as a struggle between Elle, Seattle and Los Angeles, with L.A. representing a pull backward and Seattle representing the life she’s built. That geographic tension resolves by season’s end, Kittrell said, but reopens in season two as Elle reckons with choosing Seattle without the safety net her old life provided.
The finale also closes the door, at least for now, on Elle’s fractured friendship with Shannon, a former ally who exposed a story Elle had written for Cosmopolitan. Dries called the resolution “a little awkward bow,” acknowledging the rift isn’t fully mended. Meanwhile, a separate romance between characters Liz and Kimberly moves forward, with the showrunners saying they wanted to depict a queer relationship without leaning on a familiar coming-out narrative.
Season two, which wrapped production earlier this year, will pick up immediately where the finale left off. Prime Video ordered the second season in January, months before the first episodes premiered on July 1, and cast Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as a new rival for Elle. Reviews for the debut season have been mixed, with a Rotten Tomatoes critics score in the mid-40s to mid-50s depending on the count, though the show has performed well with audiences and cracked Prime Video’s most-watched rankings within a day of release.
