A Grease prequel series, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, is coming to Paramount Plus, Variety reports.
The series will follow Rizzo, Jan, Marty, and Frenchy from the original movie as they form the Pink Ladies girl gang four years before the events of Grease. Described as four fed-up, outcast girls, the show will see them "dare to have fun on their own terms and spark a moral panic that will change Rydell High forever".
In the 1978 movie, the Pink Ladies were a group of female greaser teenagers played by Stockard Channing, Jamie Donnelly, Dinah Manoff, and Didi Conn. There haven't been any casting announcements for Rise of the Pink Ladies yet, though, so it's still anyone's guess who'll take over the iconic roles for the small screen.
Grease, released in 1978, is set in the '50s and centers around the relationship between straight-laced Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) and greaser gang leader Danny (John Travolta), whose summer romance gets more complicated when they find themselves enrolled at the same high school and at different sides of the social spectrum. Based on the 1971 musical of the same name, it became the highest-grossing movie musical of all time, a title it held until 1993 when it was overtaken by Disney's re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The series, which is set to consist of 10 hour-long episodes, will be written and executive produced by creator Annabel Oakes, who has previously worked on TV shows including Transparent and Atypical. Paramount also has a Grease prequel movie in the works, titled Summer Lovin'. It hasn't been confirmed which characters this prequel will follow, however, or when exactly it will be set.
It will be interesting to see how successful these prequels are – a Grease sequel, Grease 2, was released in 1982 and was not particularly well-received. Set two years after the first movie, it stars Michelle Pfeiffer (in her breakout role) and Maxwell Caulfield who become entangled in a similar situation to Sandy and Danny, except this time the genders are reversed.
While we wait for Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies to arrive on Paramount Plus, fill out your watch list with our picks of the best TV shows of 2020.
