Fun vs Survival: An Interview with ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ Creator, Showrunner, Director, and Writer Annabel Oakes

Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies is a musical series that takes place four years before the original Grease. In 1954, before rock ‘n’ roll ruled and before the T-Birds were the coolest in the school, four fed-up outcasts dare to have fun on their own terms, sparking a moral panic that will change Rydell High forever. The series stars Marisa Davila as Jane, Cheyenne Isabel Wells as Olivia, Ari Notartomaso as Cynthia, and Tricia Fukuhara as Nancy.

The latest musical series from Paramount+ is a refreshing take on Grease (and dare I say, better than the 1982 sequel Grease 2). Goosebumps will form from nostalgic numbers and remixes of the classic songs and Grease-heads will catch subtle nods to the classic characters we've grown to love in the original 1978 film. 

The series creator, showrunner, director, and writer Annabel Oakes recently spoke with Script about finding the heart of the show, how the research created the lens of the show, building out her writers' room, and so much more!

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: How did this series come to be?

Annabel Oakes: Paramount TV wanted to make the TV series and our producers for Marty Bowen and Eric Feig are also developing a prequel movie that's about Danny and Sandy the summer before, so they wanted something that would not touch this. So, they actually weren't thinking a prequel for the TV series at all. But yeah, I think they knew they wanted to make a TV show. It's this big jewel of the Paramount IP library. IP is how you get things made now. It's how you get people to watch now and it's the world we're all living in. And I think they were hearing pitches for many months, when they came to me, I don't think I was the first person they came to. [laughs] And then they came to me, and I really wasn't interested, because I love Grease, and there's sort of an exhaustion to all these IP properties, so I almost said no.

And then I ended up in a weird way - my cousin gave birth to her child on her bathroom floor [laughs] and I happened to be visiting DC at the time where she was and I happened to get in a cab to go meet them at the hospital when I found out they had just given birth to a baby. And in this 45-minute cab ride, I had half written the email that was like, ‘No, thank you. Thank you for thinking of me.’ And then I was just like, ‘let me just think about it for a second.’ Because it seemed like something that was gonna get made. And I was like, ‘What unanswered questions do I have about Grease?’ And I just thought about how much I love the Pink Ladies and that sleepover. That was my favorite scene in the movie. And I just wanted that scene to be the entire movie. [laughs] And so I think that's what I did - I made the TV show for the sleepover. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] The longest sleepover ever.

Annabel: [laughs] Yeah! I was still in that cab and I started Googling the Pink Ladies to see if they were real, because I thought maybe they're just like a fun, imagination of the original creators, but there was a group called the Pink Ladies at Taft High School where Jim Jacobs went to high school one on which you based Grease. So, I was like, ‘That's interesting. Who were these girls?’ And then I just started calling women in their 70s and 80s who went to high school in the 50s and 60s, starting with my mother, then her friends, then expanding. Then I got Southern California high school yearbooks, I live near John Marshall High where the carnival scenes for Grease was shot. And I found a 1954 yearbook to see what it looked like then and it was actually pretty diverse for 1954. So, everything started from a research-based approach and just talking to real people.

Sadie: LA was and is very diverse, and I like how you were able to reflect all of that into the show and that specific time period, so much great fodder for characters and stories I’m sure. While watching this, I felt like there was this thematic resonance of West Side Story meets the fun of Rock and Roll High School meets American Graffiti, but instead of the Ramones saving the day, it's the Pink Ladies.

Annabel: Oh my god. I love that!

Sadie: [laughs] But the thematic heart of your show I feel like is fun versus survival? And can you have both? And how all of these characters in this show are navigating that.

Annabel: Yeah, I think the fun versus survival - I really, really tried to approach Grease anthropologically [laughs] and really pick it apart. I watched it so many times. And I really thought about the theme of Grease is kind of breaking out of the role that has been assigned to you or that you've played before. Just to show all parts of yourself and to be able to live your truth and be with who you want to be with and all that stuff.

But the feeling you get from Grease is fun. If you've seen the stage musical, it is fun! Everybody is dancing with their arms flailing out all the time. It's high energy. It feels like a version of the 50s, that's just highly energetic. And when I talk to people who grew up in the 50s, they did say the 50s were really fun. They had a really good time; they danced, they drove cars around, there was this economic prosperity that was lifting all tides. 

I think that I was a very serious high schooler. And I don't think I had that much fun, but I wanted to. [laughs] And I really was kind of just surviving and focusing on my future the whole time. And so, I was interested in telling a story, especially for this generation of kids who I think does have fun, but is necessarily a serious generation with the world that they've been handed. I wanted to take them into the surviving high school and then going beyond into thriving in high school, and actually having fun and making those connections, making mistakes, feeling all your feelings.

Sadie: Yeah, and that it is OK. And there’s camaraderie behind it too - everyone's lifting each other up in their own way. And there isn't really a quote-unquote villain.

Annabel: We had a saying in the writers’ room where there are no villains in Grease, the only villain is the 1950s. So even the kids who kind of play the villain role, sometimes we do go under the hood of those characters later on in the season.

Sadie: What was the character development process from researching yearbooks and beyond?

Annabel: Yeah, I did the yearbooks, and I did personal interviews. I found all these stories that were really interesting that were worth telling that haven't been told about the 50s. My husband's grandparents were all inter-ethnic relationships. And you would think that they never existed in the 1950s if you've watched media about the 1950s; and my daughter has a lot of ethnicities in her heritage from my husband's side of the family. And I just felt like my husband's grandmother, I don't think ever saw herself reflected on screen in the 1950s. And I wanted to make sure that we were just widening the lens to include all the people that were really there.

Sadie: Which is really important. In terms of building out your writers’ room, what kind of voices and backgrounds were you looking for?

Annabel: I really tried to assemble a team where I would have strengths in all areas and so I wanted people who were good at drama, good at comedy, which I think is harder to find than good at drama writers. One of my writers was a swing on The Lion King when I got her and she now is the lead of the new Color Purple, so she was a musical theater actress, and she knew musicals. And then I have a bunch of musical theater dorks too, lovely musical theater dorks [laughs] who knew every musical front to back. And I wanted obviously diverse perspectives to reflect the characters in the show. I also found that when I tasked my writers with going off and talking to people in their 80s they would be able to spread into corners and have conversations that maybe I wouldn't to be able to and so it was important that we again, just widen the lens every person we added to the room widened the lens of the room and the lens of the show.

Sadie: With that research phase for the writers, were you having them interview their grandparents, asking what were they watching, listening to, etcetera?

Annabel: Yeah, that's exactly what we did. Some people's grandparents aren't alive, so it was just talk to somebody in their 80s and see what their experience was. I really had a lot of preconceptions about what I was going to find when I interviewed people. And we found so many interesting things. 

I always talk about one of my mom's best friends is named Cynthia Funk. And she was an early if not founding member of the Lavender Menace, which is a radical lesbian feminist group from the 60s and 70s. But in 1952, she was a very quiet girl who went to high school in Connecticut, and she had a secret girlfriend all throughout high school, and I assumed that this would be a really heavy secret for her to carry, and that they would be very fearful of being found out. And she said, ‘No, actually not. There's just wasn't any context for queerness back then.’ And there weren't people yelling about it on pulpits or TV, it just didn't exist, except for the stuff you could pick up from movie stars and these tiny signifiers that if you knew you knew. 

So, for them, they were sort of just inventing things and stabbing in the dark at their own identities and relationships. And she said to me, ‘We never thought of ourselves sociologically.’ And that's the big difference between the generation today and her generation. And so, I thought it was really beautiful to try to tell a story about finding your queer without the context of queerness in the world.

Sadie: Yeah, that is such an interesting way to go about it.

Annabel: Yeah, it's really interesting. We talked to a Black man in his 80s who grew up in Southern California, and he said he did date white girls and girls of different races, but you would marry a Black girl. And so we wanted to talk about, I've never seen that guy on screen, you know, and what his story is, and he went to a majority white high school. And we wanted to just tell the stories of the 50s that are the stories we already know from the 50s.

Sadie: In terms of the musical numbers, and making sure that it's also carrying and driving story and character development, how do you know when and where to place those musical numbers?

Annabel: I think we ended up in the early episodes, they were kind of all where the writers had placed them. And we would write dummy lyrics for the musical numbers. And what we would try to do in the chorus of those lyrics is really encapsulate what the theme of the song was, and in the verses tell any story we had to tell, but then I would sit down with Justin [Tranter] and the musical team, and we would go through, what is the song really about thematically? Where does this character start? Where does this character finish if we're telling story, or are we just singing about a feeling and how deep do we want to go in that feeling? And what layers of that feeling do we want to talk about?

In the later episodes, we were sort of working on the fly because we had so many production challenges in Vancouver. And so, the later episodes we had to completely rewrite episode nine to be sort of a bottle episode, because the COVID costs of rescheduling constantly put us in a hole and it's, I think, one of my favorite episodes now. But in those episodes, Justin was more involved. We were talking between each other about what those songs could be, who is owed a song this season, who's owed a feeling. 

And then in episode eight, Justin and I came up with a song for the character Wally, who wasn't originally a series regular, but had so many offers on the table that we were like, ‘Please come to the show,’ because he was so good. And we started writing more for him in the later half of the season. And we came up with a song for him with Justin and his songwriter Britney, that was a song that we came up with on the fly, and then wrote around the song.

Sadie: Having those types of restrictions and like being able to find creative liberation behind it. How often do find that in your work? I mean, I feel like it's pretty rare, right?

Annabel: Yeah, it's rare. TV's so fast. And it was something that Justin and I and all of our writers really had to just invent our own process, because there's so much original music in the show, to a point where nobody's ever done this much original music for a musical TV show that we had to really invent our own process. And we had to learn how do we navigate all the voices in the room, all the cooks in the kitchen in a TV process, but still keep it creative. And at first, we were just on the Zooms with 30 people. And then halfway through the season, we just reached these tipping points and we just started directly talking to each other more. And I think the process got really cooking when that happened.

Sadie: Keeping the tonal consistency throughout the show with your roster of directors? Obviously, you could’ve said you’d just direct all of them, but what was the importance of having others taking the helm for this show?

Annabel: Yeah, it was important to us to have a lot of different directors. It's also just a big steam train. [laughs] Prepping every episode is enormous. I had really experienced directors who are calling me saying this is ‘I'm prepping a movie.’ And we were like, ‘Yes, we're so sorry we've tricked you.’ [laughs] But we couldn't have done it without a really good producing director. And it was the best and most important hire I made hiring Alethea Jones to do it, because she really understood it. And she kept the bar really high for everyone. And we would just switch off. So she would be with the prepping director, I would be with the shooting director and then maybe sometimes she would stay with that prepping director when they shot and I would go into prep.

We just had a really beautiful process, it was really helpful. I'm nowhere near as experienced as Alethea and all these other directors. But it was helpful that I had directed before this; I understood production which was good for a show of this enormous size, and you're just changing things all the time to meet the production needs and the budget, especially in the time of COVID which nobody understood how bad it would be and how challenging it would be.

Sadie: What stage of COVID were you shooting during?

Annabel: We were shooting January through July of 2021. So, it was the worst of the pandemic - not the worst thing that people could get vaccinated, but the amount of people getting COVID and the studio's policies are always changing about close contacts. But the good thing about our show is we have this huge ensemble. And so, if we just had five actors, that would be one thing, but we have really kind 17 main characters, and we were always able to just figure it out, slide somebody in, do pickups later. And honestly, it's the spirit of Grease. Because if you watch Grease, you'll see like in the carnival scene, you'll see some suddenly very tight shots. And you're like, ‘Oh, that's a pickup’ or shots that are shooting at the sky, now everybody's in the car, and it's like, ‘Oh, that's a pickup.’ So, we were like, ‘This is Grease, baby!’

Sadie: It's kind of like a nice little nod to an actual production of a play – all hands on deck, the show must go on!

Annabel: Yeah, it was very like a 1950s musical of a 1950s musical where the show must go on! [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] What inspired you to become a writer?

Annabel: I didn't grow up in a place where people went to the theater very much. It was a military town and for me, TV was my window on the world. And it was really the way I learned about the world and connected to the world. And I obviously had friends at school and all that stuff, but reading books and watching TV really made my world very big. And so, I think I was really attracted to that. I've wanted to be a writer since I was nine years old. And so, it's hard to say whether it was a choice or just some weird thing that I came up with and stuck with because I am bad at making decisions. [laughs]

Before we go, I just want to talk about how incredible my writers’ room is and how valuable they were. And they just really cared and dug in. And we challenged each other, they challenged me - it was one of the greatest experiences. I've been on many, many TV shows and had many good experiences, but having my own writers’ room and choosing my own team is certainly the best experience I've ever had. I had three assistants who each got half script credits, and they all knocked it out of the park. It was just a really nice experience of people coming in; they came in with research, little corners of the world that we ended up pulling into the show. I'm just truly over the moon. I love collaborative writing. I love writing for TV. I'm so glad I didn't become the novelist I thought I would be when I was nine years old. [laughs] 

Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies is streaming exclusively on Paramount+.