As early as 1992, “A Class of Its Own”, a film about the founding of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, thrilled cinema audiences. Now the story is being told with a new twist in the Amazon series A League of Their Own.
It’s been 30 years since Madonna, Geena Davis and Tom Hanks starred as baseball players and their coach in “A Class of Their Own.” Penny Marshall’s cult film is now being retold as a series: “A League of Their Own”, i.e. just like the film in the English original, is the name of the dramedy series, the eight episodes of which can be seen on Amazon Prime Video from Friday, August 12th . Then as now, the focus is on the history of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL for short), a women’s professional baseball league that existed between 1943 and 1954. But while the 1990s film focused primarily on misogyny during World War II, series creator Will Graham and his colleague Abbi Jacobson are taking it even further.
Carson (Abbi Jacobson, “Disenchantment”), Max (Chanté Adams, “Roxanne Roxanne”) and their young colleagues have to deal with a number of setbacks and injuries, but also with racism and homophobia on their way to becoming professional baseball players. For series writer Graham, the new focus was an affair of the heart, as he explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “I played little league (amateur baseball) for eight years and I’m queer and it was torture and I have felt like I’d never fit in. That’s part of the reason I was so obsessed with the movie as a kid.” He continued, “It’s a story with a queer subtext, about how to find your place on the field. I’ve looked into the league’s queer history and thought about it.”
Rosie O’Donnell gets a cameo appearance
In fact, he and co-author Abbi Jacobson contacted surviving players of the AAGPBL in the course of their research for the series. Together with them and dedicated researchers, they wanted to reconstruct as detailed a picture as possible of the conditions in baseball at the time. But humor and romance also get enough space in the series. In addition to the leading actresses already mentioned, D’Arcy Carden (“The Good Place”) and Nick Offerman (“Fargo”) can also be seen in the series.
Rosie O’Donnell, who played baseball player Doris Murphy in the original film, guest-stars as bar owner Vi in the new series. Hailey Wierengo, Elizabeth Koe and Jamie Babbit serve as executive producers on the co-production between Amazon Studios and Sony Pictures Television. The latter also directed the pilot episode.
