By Laura Hyche
When Laura Kittrell graduated from Meridian High School in 2004, she never dreamed she would be living in Los Angeles today as a successful creator and co-showrunner of an Amazon Prime series like Elle.
Kittrell explains,
“I don’t think 16-year-old me would be surprised because I was naive and maybe a little delusional to think this is something I could do for a living, without coming up with a Plan B. 21-year-old me would be far more surprised because I actually had more of an understanding of how things worked, and it seemed impossible to get to do this professionally. So, I feel very, very lucky that the person I was in my 20s was wrong.”
After graduation, Kittrell attended New York University where she studied film and television. When she finished in New York, she moved to LA on the other side of the country in hopes of becoming a TV writer.
“After many, many false starts — scripts that didn’t sell, shows that got cancelled after one season — I finally got a full-time writing job and was lucky to get to work on a few shows that I loved, like Insecure on HBO. Now, I am currently running my own show on Amazon Prime, which is a prequel to the Reese Witherspoon movie series, Legally Blonde.”
Kittrell explains how she found her way to Elle.
“Around ten years ago, I wrote a script for Hello Sunshine (which is Reese Witherspoon’s production company) about a teenage girl. That show never ended up getting made, but years later, Reese had the idea to explore who Elle Woods was in high school. Since I had written about teenagers in this previous script for them, Hello Sunshine reached out to see if I would be interested in coming up with an idea for what a show about Elle Woods in high school could look like. I loved the movie Legally Blonde (which actually came out when I was a teenager — the same age as Elle is on my show), so it has been the ultimate honor for Reese to entrust me with the character and get to create this new world for her.”
The excitement will continue for Kittrell, who is currently editing this season of Elle, which will finish filming in June. She will also begin work on season two slated for 2027.
Kittrell describes a typical day as sitting with their editors and going scene by scene through every episode, looking at different performances, different camera angles, different songs or music, they can use for the soundtrack, etc.
“It’s a little like putting a puzzle together. My favorite part is when it feels like we’ve found the right puzzle piece, and everything is fitting perfectly. My least favorite part is when we’re either jamming a puzzle piece into the wrong spot, or we’ve lost a puzzle piece entirely and now there’s a big hole in the puzzle somewhere. I’m secretly wondering if I’ve accidentally ruined the puzzle.
Kittrell will return to her hometown when she visits The MAX on October 22, 2026, from 6:00 p. m. to 8:00 p.m., for “a Conversation with Laura Kittrell”.
She describes the idea of returning to Meridian as surreal.
“There are a lot of easter eggs in Season One of Elle that are references to experiences I shared with my high school friends, or places we hung out in Meridian. There’s a record store on the show called Bad Vibrations, which is named after Good Vibrations, the old record store on North Hills Street. Carpetmart is a concert venue on the show, which is named after the carpet store where my friends’ band used to play in high school. Mr. Nichols, the English teacher in Elle is named after Larry Nichols, my history teacher. So, in many ways, the show is really a love letter to my high school years in Meridian.
