Review: 'Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies' is like a confetti cannon to your face

The best word to describe "Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies" is "baffling." "Overstimulating" would be another good one. "Ludicrous" would also sum it up nicely.

Paramount+'s candy-colored intellectual-property-extension musical explosion generates little more than slack-jawed confusion as the sheer amount of stuff jumping off the screen assaults your eyes and ears. Swirling skirts meet leather jackets meet cheerleaders meet marching bands meet pin curls meet teen sex meet singing and dancing, partial nudity and  saddle shoes. And that's all just in one scene.

"Pink Ladies" (streaming Thursdays, ★½ out of four) is such a mighty morass of bad ideas that it's hard to keep it all straight. And yet, in spite of each episode being overpacked with characters, bad musical numbers and prosaic dialogue, the series is entirely lacking in substance behind all the over-exaggerated style. A pointless prequel to the 1978 classic "Grease," it is the worst kind of offender in Hollywood's obsession with franchising existing stories: too much and too little, all at once.

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Somewhere in this kaleidoscope of a series is a story about four girls who don't fit into any of the cliques at a suburban high school in the 1950s. There's Jane (Marisa Davila), a goody-two-shoes new girl who nabs the most popular guy in school, only to be instantly branded a harlot; Olivia (Cheyenne Isabel Wells), who's also shamed for her sexuality; Nancy (Tricia Fukuhara), a fashion obsessive uninterested in the trivialities of high school; and Cynthia (Ari Notartomaso), a wannabe greaser shut out of a gang because she's a girl. Cast off by their so-called friends, boyfriends, family and the school's staff, the four teens form an unlikely bond, grab some pink jackets and proceed to change their social standing.

But this story needs to be shoehorned into the "Grease" universe (every movie or TV show ever released is a universe now, apparently). So it's not just any high school – it's Rydell High. The gang is the T-Birds, and Jane is the older sister of Pink Lady Frenchie (played by Didi Conn in the original film). And, to match the original film, it's also a musical.

Musical TV shows are few and far between, but there have been a couple of recent creative successes ("Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," "Schmigadoon"). Perhaps that was enough to fool the "Pink Ladies" creators into thinking it's easy to write original songs and make them fit into episodic installments. But it's exceptionally difficult to make this genre work, and the music of "Pink Ladies" falls flat. The songs are forgettable, awkward and lacking in thematic connection to the story. The young dancers are good at their craft, but the staging and choreography are so chaotic it's impossible to focus while watching the dizzying spectacle.

In today's crowded TV landscape, it's hard to stand out. "Pink Ladies" has clearly embraced the philosophy of more is more, attempting to grab your attention by singing at you as loudly as it can.

But at a certain point, it all just becomes noise.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies' review: A confetti cannon