Brusha Brusha Brusha! If you’re anything like us, you can’t pop on your trusty VHS of the 1978 teen horndog musical Grease without becoming overwhelmed by a gnawing panic. How can I possibly understand this story about how these bobby sock hotties are totally doing it on the reg and singing about it, you certainly ask yourself, without knowing how the girl gang known as the Pink Ladies got those matching jackets? Paramount+ understands the distress this may cause, and so has green-lit a ten-episode prequel series called Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the show’s logline says, “Before rock ‘n’ roll ruled, before the T-Birds were the coolest in the school, four fed-up, outcast girls dare to have fun on their own terms, sparking a moral panic that will change Rydell High forever.†Back in 2019, Paramount Television announced that it was producing a musical series called Grease: Rydell High for HBO Max. Now, it has gone under a “creative overhaul†on its journey to Paramount+. We hope this “overhaul†includes a doubling-down on the casting conventions of the original movie, in which all the high-schoolers were played by actors in their mid-20s to early 30s. Just like how Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp was a prequel to the original, which already cast grown adults as teens, only now those adults were even older … why not get Stockard Channing and Didi Conn in there to play Rizzo and Frenchy as freshmen? There are worse things they could do.