Stream It or Skip It: ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ on Paramount+, a Prequel to the Musical That Feels Like ‘Glee’ With Poodle Skirts

Who didn’t love Grease? It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen the stage musical that has been around for 50 years or fell in love with Olivia Newton-John and/or John Travolta while watching the 1978 film version; the musical endures because of its amazing music and appealing stars. A new series goes back to Rydell High School, albeit a few years before the events of the original story, to tell a musical story about how the group of girlfriends called the Pink Ladies was founded.

GREASE: RISE OF THE PINK LADIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A car on a bluff that overlooks the city. Two teenagers are inside, steaming the windows.

The Gist: It’s the end of the summer, of 1954. Jane Facciano (Marisa Davila), the bookish “new girl” who entered Rydell High School in the middle of the previous school year after moving from Brooklyn is making out with Buddy (Jason Schmidt), the popular student body president. He wants this to be more than just a summer romance; he wants to go steady, and he gives Jane his varsity jacket to prove it.

They pull into the drive-in to make their coupledom public. Of course, everyone is dumbfounded seeing Jane with Buddy’s arm around her. Popular blonde Susan (Madison Thompson) makes like she’s sad that her ex is with someone who, as her friend Rosemary (Charlotte Kavanagh) says, is “so square she’s a cube.” Also at the drive-in are the T-Birds, the gang of greasers that play mild pranks around Rydell; the leader of the gang, Richie Valdovinos (Johnathan Nieves) is super protective of his sister Olivia (Cheynne Isabel Wells), who got a reputation after an affair with a teacher was exposed the previous school year. Susan decides to go after Richie as revenge for Buddy, but Richie’s bravado buckles under the sexual pressure.

Also at the drive-in is Cynthia Zdunowski (Ari Notartomaso), a “tomboy” who hangs with the T-Birds and wants to be a member; of course, the fact that she’s a girl works against her. Nancy Nakagawa (Tricia Fukuhara) is there alone, bothering the smooching couples with her fashion design observations.

Buddy and Jane decide to “go all the way,” and Dot (Josette Halpert), who gets bullied within her group of popular girls, sees it and starts to call people. Word spreads fast.

The first day of school arrives, and Jane already has a reputation that she can’t shake. For her part, Olivia decides to “lean into” her reputation and goes to school in a slinky skirt and tight blouse. Richie decides to publicly reject cheerleader Susan by the bleachers outside; when she accuses him of being a perv, Jane defends him, gaining Olivia’s trust.

The pep rally turns out to be a disaster, mainly because Buddy, in the usual double standard, let the rumor that they went all the way propagate. Buddy tells Jane that, in order for him to get re-elected as class president, they have to temporarily break up, even after he tells her he loves her. At the election assembly, Jane first decides not to run for council. But when someone calls her a “slut”, she decides to stand up for herself as the outsider who represents the school’s other misfits and outsiders. Olivia, Cynthia, and Nancy stand up for her, too, and nominate her for class president.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like we said in the headline, Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies somehow combines the look of the film Grease with songs that would fit better on Glee.

Our Take: Making a prequel to Grease, a 45-year-old movie (and 50-year-old stage musical) about a time period that takes place almost 70 years ago, was chancy, no matter how popular the source material was. Trying to marry the sensibilities of the time to modern music and dance was going to be tough. We salute Annabel Oakes (Atypical, Minx) for the attempt, but the first episode crashes and burns so badly that we can’t see how she’ll pull this off during the show’s first season.

You have to remember the culture of 1954. Rock ‘n’ Roll barely existed. Everyone was so sexually repressed they were ready to explode. Girls were taught home economics with a textbook that had the title “Modern Woman” on the cover; the double standard of having a “reputation” was strong, and the whole idea of a “JD” aka “juvenile delinquent” was well known. It’s hard to know if the demographic that the show is aiming at is the Millennials and Zoomers who have no idea this existed or the Gen Xers who loved the original movie.

No matter who it’s aimed at, though, the show misses the mark, and the main problem is the songs. The four characters that will make up the Pink Ladies — Jane, Olivia, Nancy, and Cynthia — all have a bit of depth to them, and we see them all featured at some point or another in a first-episode song-and-dance routine (we especially liked Notartomaso leading the T-Birds in a snappy song about being “new school,” the best song of the hour). The rest all feel like one-dimensional characters, at least at first.

But the songs, which are trying to forward the story, suffer from three problems: They’re unmemorable, sound too generic and modern, and — worst of all — the lyrics come at the viewer so fast and furious they’re hard to understand. There’s a reason why people still sing the songs from the original movie: The songs stick in the head and the lyrics for most of them are easily deciphered and help advance the story. Even songs from the original that aren’t so clear, like “Greased Lightning,” were catchy enough to stick in our memories to the point where we were shocked by the lyrics when we finally understood them decades later.

At least two songs went over our heads: One in the home ec room where Olivia tries to explain why Jane is more goody-two-shoes than anything, and the final song of the episode, where the four new friends decide to create their own gang. At least that’s what we thought those songs were about; we guessed more using context and what lyrics we could actually hear.

But, as we said, if the songs were memorable, this would be less of a problem. In an era when there wasn’t even doo-wop to fall back on, the modern sound of the songs is too incongruous. Even the beat-heavy take on Frankie Valli’s classic theme song from the film didn’t work, even though the original version was incongruous with the ’50s theme, as well. When the song and dance numbers kick in, we feel like we’re watching Glee with poodle skirts and not a take on Grease.

Sex and Skin: There are some hands up dresses, but mostly things are chaste in the first episode.

Parting Shot: After a musical number where it seems like the bed the new Pink Ladies are on floats into the sky, the girls are back in reality. Jane says, “We need to get ourselves some jackets.”

Sleeper Star: We like Tricia Fukuhara as Nancy because she’s determined to become a top designer and leave whatever town Rydell is in, even after her buddies abandon her to play “tonsil hockey” under the bleachers with their new boyfriends. Jackie Hoffman is also great as beleaguered assistant principal Mrs. McGee.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Kissing you is like going through a car wash without a car,” Richie tells Susan, as his way of publicly rejecting the cheerleader like a T-Bird should.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While we appreciate the story of how the four girls in The Pink Ladies become loyal friends, the music of Grease: The Rise Of The Pink Ladies is so generic and unintelligible we can’t see ourselves sitting through the musical numbers in order to get to the better parts of the story.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.