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2019
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- Inevitably building toward a big game, “A League of Their Own” doesn’t go down in the box score as an unqualified success – it’s basically a solid single – but credit the producers with an interesting idea, slickly produced, which feels a bit too stretched and slow spread over eight episodes.
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Aug 12, 2022 · Aug. 12, 2022. A subset of TV’s seemingly endless crop of reboots adapt well-known properties from yesteryear but with more thoughtful or thorough approaches to race or gender, or both. The ...
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A League of Their Own puts some spin on its pitch, lobbing a serialized expansion that swerves dangerously close to anachronism but hits home thanks to a roster filled with all-stars and...
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- August 12, 2022
- Abbi Jacobson
- The beloved 1992 movie gets an inspired reimagining that digs deeper into the lives and era of the pro baseball league.
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- Verdict
By Tara Bennett
Posted: Aug 12, 2022 6:25 pm
All eight episodes of A League of their Own premiere Aug. 12 on Prime Video.
Director Penny Marshall’s 1992 feel-good sports dramedy A League of Their Own has had 30 years to secure itself in the pop culture lexicon as both a modern classic and for Tom Hanks’ now legendary delivery of the line, “There’s no crying in baseball!” The movie still casts a long shadow in the hearts and minds of audiences, which is a double-edged sword for any project that attempts to revive the property. Wisely, the Prime Video series A League of Their Own, co-created by Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson, does just about everything right in lightly tipping its cap to the film, yet stridently forging its own creative path. What results is an ensemble piece that is a far richer and more realistically crafted story that still celebrates the game of baseball, just with an even stronger female lens.
From its kinetic opening scene of frazzled Idaho housewife Carson Shaw (Abbi Jacobson) running — with her brassiere hanging out — to make the departing train to Chicago, A League of Their Own the series wastes no time in setting its own tone and voice. Shaw loves baseball, is a catcher herself, and isn’t going to waste the improbable opportunity to try out for one of the teams in the newly formed All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. While her husband Charlie (Patrick J. Adams) is stationed overseas during WWII, Shaw follows her gut to go out on her own to join a field full of other women from around the country ready to chase their dreams. She first meets life-long friends, glam Greta (D'Arcy Carden) and tough Jo (Melanie Field) from Queens, and then gets introduced to pitcher Lupe (Roberta Colindrez), young Cuban player Eli (Priscilla Delgado), and Shirley (Kate Berlant), who has a mighty case of OCD. And then Max Chapman (Chanté Adams) from Rockford, Ill., walks onto the field (where the Rockford Peaches will be based) to try out for pitcher, but she’s quickly told that opening up a league for women is already a bridge too far for polite society, so allowing any Black women to participate is not in the cards. Max’s best friend Clance (Gbemisola Ikumelo) nurses her disappointment on the train back home.
It’s that separation point that sets the stage for the structure of how the series will proceed, with Carson and Max serving as the dual protagonists in all eight episodes. Carson is placed in the Peaches, where she’ll have to figure out how to come into her own as a leader, navigate the imposed misogyny of their sponsor, candy bar mogul Morris Baker (Kevin Dunn) and his charm school edicts, and the non-existent coaching by former pro baseball star Dove Porter (Nick Offerman). At the same time, Max works every opportunity she can to keep her pitching dream alive, including forcefully making the local screw factory hire her so she can try out for the company baseball team and evading her mom’s (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) insistence that she settle down with a nice local man and take over their beauty salon when she retires. The series writers craft every episode to flip back and forth between the two women equally, fleshing out their everyday lives, with their friend and family dramas until they reunite by chance outside a local Rockford bar. A potential flashpoint between them instead becomes a commonality, along with their passion for baseball, that creates a bridge to them figuring out how to build a friendship.
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It’s to be commended that every actress within the Peaches team, even the guest roles, get time to shine. Every kind of woman in the series gets the benefit of context, which means there’s resonance in so many unexpected places. And for the few like Maybelle (Molly Ephraim), Jess (Kelly McCormack), and Sgt. Beverly (Dale Dickey) who don’t get as much screen time as others, it just makes us hope for a second season even more. The same goes for Max’s circle of women who are also fantastic in portraying the female strength of Max’s community, as they navigate the daily challenges of being Black at the time, which is just another layer of what’s so interesting about how this series tells its stories. There’s generational trauma and triumph and the explicit exploration of attitudes about sexulaity that are not swept under the rug. In particular, Lea Robinson's work as Uncle Bertie is so powerful and compassionate, and adds a unique way to explore Max’s exploration of self.
With a solid pacing of episodes to story ratio, A League of Their Own introduces a lot to unpack and explore in the lives of these women. And it balances two protagonists extremely well, building Carson and Max towards a series of season-ending climactic moments that really feel earned with gripping payoffs. Overall, the series achieves a better authenticity in regards to portraying the depth and breadth of the actual experiences of the real players of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Through the series characters, the incredible history of the league feels more thoroughly expressed and more expansively portrayed without taking anything away from the movie experience. They both exist in parallel as two great things telling similar stories.
A League of Their Own is one of the best reimaginings of a beloved movie into a series out there. Co-creators Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson wisely limit how much they carry over – mostly just the historical and location basics of the film’s premise regarding the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League – and then start from scratch with thei...
95% Avg. Tomatometer 91 Reviews 87% Avg. Audience Score 1,000+ Ratings Following the journey of the WWII All-American professional women's baseball league players as they travel across a...
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Aug 11, 2022 · It's 1943, and Carson Shaw is running as fast as she can. Specifically, she's running to catch a train that will take her to Chicago for the tryouts of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball...
Aug 10, 2022 · Amazon's 'A League of Their Own' stars Abbi Jacobson, D'Arcy Carden and Chanté Adams in a TV reboot of the classic baseball dramedy.
Aug 10, 2022 · ‘A League of Their Own’ Review: Abbi Jacobson’s Prime Video Reboot Is an Off-speed Pitch Worth Waiting For. Like a slow curveball that finds the heart of the plate, the Prime Video series is a...
