A well-a well-a well-a, oop!
Tell me more, tell me more.
Like who is this for?
Tell me more, tell me more.
Should we show it the door?
Sydney Buses have been doing their level best of late to get me to subscribe to a streaming service to watch a new series called "Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies". To put this in context, this series is presumably a prequel of sorts to the film "Grease" and to a time before the protagoist of that film, Sandra Dee, arrives at Rydell High School. I am intriuged by this series, not because I intent to subscribe to the streaming service but because I am quite quite bewildered as to whom the intended audience is. The whole reason why this series was greenlight is a complete mystery. Here is why.
"Grease", starring John Travola as Danny Zukko and Olivia Newton-John as Sandra Dee, was a rock-and-roll musical which was released against the unexpected blockbuster of 1977's "Star Wars". "Grease" was released in 1978 and for its day, was a retro musical set in 1958. I get this. Retro is basically a form of nostalgia which has been packaged up and resold as a cheap dopamine generator. Grease was a piece of pastiche which made use of the tropes from the late 1950s, especially the musical tropes of doo-wop changes, and the blues I-IV-V-I sequence, then dressed it in the bubblegum version of the era.
Growing up as a kid, there were several radio stations which played rock-and-roll music from the 1950s and 1960s, for the Baby Boomer generation and the tail end of the silent generation. I have a strange knowledge of music which was made in the 20 years before I was born for that reason. Retro seems to follow on at about 20 years behind whatever is current as kids get a handle on the media that their parents lived through. Grease as a piece of retro media in 1978 made perfect sense in the day.
It follows that Grease itself as a piece of media, is going to get its own echo retro which should follow. As it was released in 1978, then that echo retro should have arrived in 1998 but it did not. Instead, what this TV Series is, is a piece of echo echo retro, which has been made 25 years after an echo, 20 years after an echo, 20 years after the original as retro.
Perhaps we should blow you mind to bits even further. Grease which was set in 1958, looks at kids who were in their final year of high school. This means that they are 18 years old in the story. 1958 - 18 = 1940. Children who were born in 1940 are not Baby Boomers but Silent Generation children and who would be 83 years old in 2023.
Here's the problem. "Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies" is set in a time where you have Silent Generation children and Greatest and Lost Generation parents. If this is a show about intergenerational conflict, then the antagonists, who are Greatest and Lost Generation parents are mostly all dead. Even the youngest of the Silent Generation are 78 years old now.
Are Silent Generation viewers going to be watching this show through the lens of nostalgia? I doubt it. Are Baby Boom viewers going to be watching this show through the lens of replayed retro? I doubt it. If this is made for presumably Generation X, Y, and Z (because the oldest of Generation Alpha is now 12 years old) then who of them are going to watch this through the sense of retro? I do not know.
Maybe this is meant to be watched in the same way that I watch Poirot. Poirot is set in the 1930s; which means that as a Generation X member, it plays more like a period piece. I feel the same way about watching Granada's Sherlock Holmes which starred Jeremy Brett. Most of those stories are set in the 1890s; which means that if Holmes is in his 30s, then he was born in the 1860s or 1850s.
As "Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies" is set in the 1950s, it is set in the era of the Trente Gloriuses, in which household incomes are still rising, television is starting to become a thing in people's houses, and the invention of the teenager is a thing as they are able to rush into the workforce and get meaningful jobs and buy really cool cars. These last two things are like a major slap in the face to the teenagers of today, the late Generation Z kids, whose jobs have been replaced by machines before they ever got to work in them and where all of the cool cars have disappeared.
I grew up in the tail end of the Cold War. As such, I got to witness the dismantling of the welfare state and the progressive breaking of the social contract and ladder that the people who had fought in the war made with the children of the future to make the world better. The Silent Generation who never had to fight in the war and the Baby Boomers who mostly didn't have to fight in a war, have spent the last 40 years, kicking the ladder out from underneath them. Some of Generation X have been able to jump onto the ladder, some have not. Less of Generation Y have been able to jump onto the ladder. Generation Z can't jump on the ladder at all. Generation Alpha doesn't know that there's a ladder.
All of this means to say that I do not know who the intended audience of this show is. Prime TV watching demographic used to be 18-48. None of these people saw Grease as anything other than echo retro. To set a show in presumably 1955-58, is asking the audience to imagine an optimism which they never ever witnessed. The people who saw Grease the first time as retro in 1978, are mostly old and unlikely to want to subscribe to streaming services. The people who lived through the 1950s at that age, are even less likely to. The people who have only ever seen Grease as received media have been given a show which on the face of it, they can not inherently relate to. This means that if "Grease: The Rise Of The Pink Ladies" is going to work as a TV series, it will have to do so as a period piece which only survives on the strength of it writing.
Summer dreams, ripped at the seams but oh...
Those summer... Niiiiiiiiights!
Actually, Mrs R came up with the best answer for who this is for.
It's for theatre nerds.
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