Opinion: Paramount+ series ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ is overdue

Editor’s Note: Ani Bundel has been blogging professionally since 2010. A DC native, she is the associate editor and podcast co-host at WTEA/PBS’ British TV website, Telly Visions. Find her on Twitter @anibundel. The opinions expressed in this commentary are the writer’s own. View more opinion on CNN.

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It’s been 45 years since “Grease” hit the big screen in 1978. At the time, it was already a nostalgia play for an era that was fast receding. Adapted from a Broadway musical that debuted in 1972, the 1950s-steeped movie depicts the unlikely romance between the stereotypical goodie two-shoes girl of the era, Sandy Olsson, and the Elvis-esque greaser bad boy Danny Zuko. Yet its reincarnation this Thursday as a Paramount+ musical TV series could not be more timely.

Paramount was actually a trailblazer when its 1970s “Grease” producers envisioned an entire franchise based on the hit film (whose initial release took in some $740 million worldwide in today’s numbers) in the form of multiple movies. That may not sound all that innovative in the 2020s, when the gaping maw of streaming must be constantly fed and IP juggernauts like Marvel and “Yellowstone” are wrung for all they’re worth. In 1978, however, such wide-scale ambitions were ahead of their time.

Unfortunately, the company’s forward-thinking wasn’t rewarded by viewers, perhaps because the follow-up film in 1982 — the now-cult-hit “Grease 2” — was also ahead of its time. It flipped the gender roles to star Michelle Pfeiffer as tough girl Stephanie Zinone, leader of girl gang the Pink Ladies, with Maxwell Caulfield playing Michael Carrington, a soft and prim exchange student. The formula was soundly rejected, as were the much-closer-to-R-rated musical numbers.

Now, though, audiences are primed for nostalgia franchises and are craving edgier, diverse, more socially relevant fare. This iteration of “Grease,” subtitled “Rise of the Pink Ladies,” achieves all that by, ironically, staying much closer to the source material.

Set four years before the original film’s events, “Rise of the Pink Ladies” repositions the members of the titular girl gang as the series leads and reframes the posse as what it represented in the…