Nobody in their right mind would pinpoint Grease’s Pink Ladies as proto-feminists. Sure, Rizzo pointed out there were worse things for her to do than “go with a boy, or two”, but most of the 1978 film (and the musical it’s based on) is taken up with them obsessing over boys. Sandi even becomes a completely different person in order to bag her man, even though he’s already smitten, as evidenced by his horrible cardigan.
This ten-part series musical reboot, a sort of prequel to the movie, has a different agenda. As is now increasingly the norm, it takes a well-known and much-loved property and refashions it for a 21st century audience, diversifying the cast and cranking up the female empowerment. It’s even inclusive to jocks.
It’s five years before the events of the movie, and Jane (Marisa Davila, hiding behind a pair of brainiac specs, as is traditional), is in her second year at Rydell High, the first having been a grim ordeal of New Girl hell. Nonetheless she has somehow spent the summer planning an pep rally and necking in cars with the school’s reigning student body president and star quarterback Buddy (Jason Schmidt), whose easygoing ways and growing inclination to fancy clever girls doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on any of his awful mates.
Inevitably his ex-girlfriend Susan is one of the cliquey cheerleaders, and she’s not happy to find that the boy who dumped her is going steady with someone else, especially such a nobody as Jane Facciano. When Buddy unwisely engages in locker room talk that grossly inflates his in-car activities with his new girlfriend, the stage is set for a ritual humiliation.
But Jane, a hard-working Italian-Puerto Rican-American girl from an aspirational family, isn’t going to take this lying down (she didn’t even do that the first time, whatever Buddy says). And nor, it transpires, are the other outsider girls struggling for acceptance – Mexican student Olivia (Cheyenne Isabel Wells), whose love affair with a teacher last year has her marked out as a slut while he keeps his job (this is by far the most interesting storyline); Tricia Fukuhara’s brilliantly weird Nancy, an aspiring fashion designer who has no interest in boys and spent her childhood being blamed by other kids for the Second World War; and Cynthia, an enthusiastic rebel and wannabe T-Bird, “too girl to be a boy and too boy to be a girl”, played by the non-binary trans actor Ari Notartomaso.
When Jane, her reputation in tatters, defiantly decides to stand against Buddy for school president in the name of the vast majority of non-popular kids having a less than brilliant time, these three impulsively band together to endorse her, and as the newly fearsome foursome the Pink Ladies (after a number of false starts, including the Black Widows and – hah – the Yellowjackets) begin to grow into and embrace their difference with each others’ support.
It’s interesting to find, then, that this trend of reworking and culturally updating an old but creaking property for the next generation has now become so well established that you can apparently do it by numbers. Literally musical numbers in this case, none of which are remotely memorable, but all of which are presented with a pleasingly stagey brio and energetic dance routines.
Issues of sexism and race are touched upon in quite interesting ways – a game of spin the bottle ends with a striking moment of realisation for Jane, that any attempt to humiliate Buddy with his previous sexual exploits will only enhance his reputation and destroy that of another girl; and there’s a whole thing about the local country club, which traditionally hosts the school’s annual dance but doesn’t let black, brown, Asian, Jewish, you name it visitors to set foot in there the other 364 days a year, unless they’re wearing a maid’s uniform.
Olivia is penalised for wearing exactly the same dress as a schoolmate but “not in the same way”, causing a “distraction” for the boys, and there’s a nice opening number to the second episode that shows the school mums gossiping on the phone about bad influences while popping pills, boozing and getting their kicks on the top of the washing machine. But you only need clock each character and the bare bones of his or her story before you get a very strong feeling that you know exactly where each of them is going.
Still, four episodes in (they’re an hour each, which is categorically 15 minutes too long) perhaps it has surprises in store. Buddy’s arc is just getting going, his eyes opening to the effects on his less privileged friends of the structures that allow him to shine, and the pressure of trying to conform to his father’s expectations is beginning to tell. He also has a burgeoning friendship with smart black student Hazel, which is promising, and the depiction of the central quartet’s closeness is genuinely sweet. And there’s an intriguing blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment for Olivia’s brother Richie, the cute badboy leader of this generation of T-Birds, which teases a darker turn, though whether it melts away like one of the desserts at Nancy’s family icecream joint remains to be seen.
What’s not entirely clear is, why Grease? There are some nice nods to the original: Jane’s chatty little sister Fran is given the “vulgar” (according to her mother) nickname ‘Frenchy’ by her posturing new pal Betty (Rizzo’s first name, fact fans), who also pierces her new friend’s ears, in an echo of the film’s sleepover scene. And the show looks great, with fizzy, colour-popping Fifties sets and costumes, even if the language is occasionally anachronistic, with 21st century buzz-phrases like “lean in” and “you’re enough” screamingly out of place.
But this feels like it’s aimed at the lower-to-middle end of the young adult market, the kind of kids who made Netflix’s Heartstopper such a rampant hit. The difference is that that show, adapted from Alice Oseman’s adorable series of graphic novels, tapped into that audience directly because they were already fans, with a sense of ownership that can be gold dust to a network. Grease, on the other hand, is not even my era – it was released shortly before I was born. This feels like a TV commissioner trying to rework something they loved from their youth for the kids from their second marriage, which strikes me as a bit of a gamble. It’s sweet as a sundae, but the flavour’s pretty vanilla.
