Grease: Rise of The Pink Ladies - Manage Your Expectations

Grease is back, but not in the way you’d think. With Paramount+ trying to solidify its content, they dove back into an old favorite to bring us the Grease prequel Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. So what is the scoop? Is it worth the watch or just another cheap reboot on a nostalgia tour?

From Paramount+:

Musical comedy about how the infamous Pink Ladies began and how the reverence, fear, and moral panic they sparked changed Rydell High forever.

Let’s get the truth right out of the way. If you’re looking for a carbon copy of the original that gives you all the butterflies, you’re not getting it with Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. If that is your lone reason for watching, you’re a bit misguided. You’re never going to capture the magic of seeing something iconic like Grease again for the first time. The show does a great job of playing into the story set up by the original musical and there are some good Easter eggs along the way. However, it is a prequel that as the title states, shows how the Pink Ladies came to be.

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If you’re still reading, then that hasn’t turned you off and you’d like more information. Is Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies worth trying to squeeze into your cluttered viewing schedule? Your expectations should be somewhere between your love of Grease and the tv show Glee. It does have the teenage angst nailed down to the button. Something about the original Grease made us feel like the cast was older than it was. In Pink Ladies, there is more of a tone closer to teenagers despite the cast being similar in age to the original.

But, that’s not the reason Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies feels different in tone. Grease originally was a love story with a high school backdrop. The prequel is more of a high school drama with the occasional love story sprinkled in. So if you’re looking for those love ballads to burst out to in the car on the way to work, they’re not as frequent. However, the most important part of any musical is getting the songs to tell a story in an upbeat, catchy, or memorable way, which they accomplish. You might get a little less Summer Nights or Hopelessly Devoted (To You) and a little more Beauty School Dropout and Greased Lightnin’.

That’s not to say that you won’t enjoy Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, it’s a perfectly good musical that fits into the world of Grease. This is just meant to tamper down expectations so you’re not blasting a perfectly fine show on social media because it didn’t meet your standards. Paramount+ took the challenge of making an established piece of movie history and expanding on it. You’re never going to capture the magic of seeing it again for the first time. Comparing the two is a recipe for disaster. You might not love it, but you probably won’t hate it either.