With one day left in Pride Month, Paramount Plus announced it was failing to renew Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies for a second season, and the network was also pulling it from the streaming service. It deserved better.
Taking place a few years before the original film, the series follows four (eventually five) high school outcasts who decide to form a girl gang and try to reform the deeply cliquish Rydell High. Along the way is a lot of adolescent love, addressing social problems, and teenage shenanigans. Think Glee, but with way cooler clothes, original songs, and Easter Eggs for Grease fans.
Was the show amazing? The best ever? Nah. Despite having megahit maker Justin Tranter writing the songs, few were standout hits. Tranter (and lyricist Brittany Campbell) had the nigh-impossible task of penning tunes that sounded like the ‘70s imitating the ‘50s, but with 2020’s production, and the result was mixed. “Brutal Honesty,” “Same Sky” and “Sorry to Distract” were bangers, and there were a few great callbacks to Grease 2 like “Good Girl Act,” but there was nothing equal to “Summer Lovin’” or “Girl for All Seasons.”
The show also fumbled its plot fairly often. It rarely seemed to know what it was about. The beginning started as an examination of slut shaming, then it was a remake of the 1999 film Election with some uncomfortable nods to the 2016 presidential race, and it ended by stopping a wedding between a teacher and a student. There was a lot going on, but not in the frivolous vignette way that defines the Grease films. Often, it was just too serious.
And yet, the show did make some good noise.
The five leads who eventually make up the Pink Ladies were all spectacular. Tricia Fukuhara as Nancy Nakagawa alone was worth the price of Paramount plus for two months. An anti-social fashionista with a blunt and near-Satanic sense of humor, she was responsible for the funniest moments in the show. Her proto-goth girl presence added edge to the Pink Ladies and chaos to the plot whenever it was required. Nancy took the concept of ride or die very, very seriously.
She was also there for one of the greatest scenes I have ever witnessed on television. Her fellow Pink Lady is Cynthia (Ari Notartomaso), a gender non-conformer who is reeling from being denied entry into the T-Birds boy gang and a growing attraction to a female classmate in drama club. Cynthia cracks the most jokes and at times feels like the only character that really could have been lifted out of the 1978 film, but she’s also the one struggling the hardest with her identity.
Note: Notartomaso uses they/them pronouns but the character uses she/her.
After an emotional breakdown by Cynthia, Tricia comes to her house and tries to find out what’s wrong. Too upset to speak, Cynthia writes Nancy a note on a piece of paper, presumably confessing her attraction to another girl. Nancy reads the note, writes something back, and the two laugh and hug.
Just describing it does it no justice. Notartomaso and Nakagawa put on an absolute masterclass of silent acting. The tense expressions, the way Nakagawa has to tug the note out of Notartomaso’s hands with the gentle brutality that is Nancy’s trademark, and the collapse into each other’s arms crying at the end was just magical. Coming out scenes have been done a million different ways over the last 30 years, but this one topped them all.
That’s where Rise of the Pink Ladies was at its best. Grease is, in the end, a story about friendship despite all the stupid shit high school demands of kids who are just trying to grow up. In that regard, Rise of the Pink Ladies hit it out of the park. The overall whole might wobble like the Shake Shack, but there are unbeatable parts.
All these shows disappearing from streaming services are doing so because studios want to avoid paying residuals and licensing fees. They’d rather deny audiences a chance to rewatch beloved titles on services they pay for than cut creators a few more checks. It’s the same short-sighted dumbassery that let so much of television history get lost in the 1950s and ‘60s.
More than that, it’s denying shows like this the chance to find their real audiences. While nothing will outright disappear thanks to piracy, ease of access is the way that some shows develop hardcore fandoms that sustain properties in between big-studio cash grabs. Paramount, owner of bloody Star Trek, should know that better than anyone.
That goes double when talking about projects starring historically excluded groups. Of the five Pink Ladies, only Cynthia is white. The rest are people of color, which is openly addressed in the show. Segregation, miscegenation, the Japanese internment camps, and passing as white are all tackled well in Rise of the Pink Ladies on top of the sexism that drives much of the plot. A lot of kids dealing with the current social backlashes of the moment could see themselves in the Pink Ladies.
Or, you know, they could if the show was available to watch.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
