“Sometimes you gotta be bad to do good,” says Marisa Davila’s Jane in the new trailer for Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. With those words, the stage is set for the prequel series, which premieres on Paramount+ on April 6th.
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies is set in 1954 — four years before the events of Grease. In the series, Jane teams with Nancy (played by Tricia Fukuhara), Olivia (Cheyenne Wells), and Cynthia (Ari Notartomaso) at Rydell High to form the titular Pink Ladies girl gang, and sets off a moral panic in the process.
Their efforts are met with resistance by Jackie Hoffman’s Assistant Principal McGee, who issues the following warning: “Ladies, you must be careful with whom you associate. A girl’s reputation is all that she has.” Thankfully, the quartet doesn’t heed her words.
Pop hitmaker Justin Tranter wrote the original music for Rise of the Pink Ladies, which creator and showrunner Annabel Oakes described in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly as “R&B with an amp.” Oakes added, “We want to pay tribute to the real people who started rock & roll — Black musicians, Latinx musicians, who were at the forefront.”
Oakes served as executive producer alongside director Alethea Jones, with Jamal Sims handling choreography.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include the official trailer.
