"Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies" values sisterhood and friendship to an extremely high degree. If the girls from the original "Grease" were good friends to one another, this might make sense, but as we covered above, they were as terrible to one another as they were to outsiders. Consider this painful example: Rizzo confesses to Marty that she thinks she's pregnant, and Marty nearly-immediately gossips about this to her own boyfriend, which in turn gets back to Kenickie (Jeff Conaway), the possible father-to-be. If the T-Birds captured by the movie are generally jerks, then so are their counterparts. That's not even getting into how the movie fat-shames Jan (Jamie Donnelly).
The show doesn't explain why there's such a huge switch in social norms between its setting and that of the original film. It sets up too many unanswerable questions. If the Pink Ladies were created as a form of rebellion against the T-Birds, why does it later become Pink Lady Lore that the two cliques must only inter-date, with no outsiders allowed to interlope? "Grease 2" has a specific subplot that bars the film's central couple from getting together because of this.
In fact, even "Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies" suffers from this dissonance, because it's hemmed in by what "Grease" will do with itself. Watching the show on its own merits, it's hard not to feel saddened by where this is going to end up, just four years later. By 1958, there are still no female T-Birds, most of the women of Rydell will not sport unique ambitions, and the Pink Ladies will exist as little more than supporters for the T-Birds' activities. Not quite a feminist ending.
