is to hold such affection for Penny Marshall’s 1992 baseball movie A League of Their Own that for years I felt an irrationally strong flash of disappointment whenever her name appeared in the TV guide and I ended up switching to a sports quiz. I was waiting for Madonna with a baseball bat; I have James Corden and golf gags. Such a terrible wrong will finally be righted by this new A League of Their Own (Amazon Prime Video), a beautiful, warm and expansive version in eight episodes of the story that inspired the film: the trials and tribulations of a league women’s baseball, set up to attract paying bettors during wartime, which was hugely popular in its day and then all but erased from sports history.
While Marshall’s film largely told the story of Dottie (Geena Davis), this has the time and the cultural appetite to tell the stories of many women from all walks of life. Abbi Jacobson, who co-created the show with Will Graham, stars as Carson, a small-town slugger who takes a last-minute train to Chicago to try out for the league. There she meets a ragtag group of other baseball fans who will become a new version of the family.
It’s charming from the start. Jacobson, who rose to prominence with Broad City, is an effervescent standout whose comedic style comes across as something of a standoff, navigating his way through varying degrees of embarrassment, while clinging to winning sincerity. There’s a democracy to his role here, both as star and showrunner. Carson is one of the main characters, whose importance to the team grows throughout the series, but she is reluctant to take the spotlight. One of the underlying messages – crucial, I guess, in team sports stories – is the importance of sticking together. It’s a surprisingly encouraging, even inspiring, feel-good drama, but without falling into banal platitudes or overly sentimentalism.
The story begins with Carson, but quickly expands to a larger church. Her co-lead is Max (Chanté Adams), a wobbly arm pitcher who is barred from tryouts for the new women’s league because she’s black.
Carson and Max deal with their own issues and problems, and while they meet occasionally to discuss their lives, their orbits are very different. Shows that run on two separate tracks don’t always come together, but here it works beautifully, and both sides have their own appeal. Max’s story is particularly rich and unfolds at an enjoyable pace as she discovers what is possible for her and who she can be.
It’s 1943, so racism and sexism abound, as does the question of what femininity is supposed to look like. The league is a commercial enterprise, and the chocolate magnate who finances the idea despairs the athletes in front of him: “My God, look at their calves, they are huge!
It’s a simple idea, but putting these players in a world of opponents, who tell them they can’t do this and they can’t do that, is quite effective, because it means that each triumph hits hard. And while men see it as an exercise in making money, the stakes for women couldn’t be higher. From the players to their chaperone, this is something much bigger and more poignant than sport. It’s about living a life they never thought they could live.
This plays out in the love stories that underscore the action on the pitch. Bombshell Greta (D’Arcy Carden of The Good Place) is the closest thing to a Madonna character here, and while she claims to crave uniformed soldiers on leave, Carson soon discovers she has more than that.
There are butch characters, who balk at the rules that say they have to wear a skirt, and several queer romances, although the fact that it’s the 1940s means that, for all the openness viewers can see, much of the story still happens in the shadows. A trip to a queer speakeasy later in the series is a murderous reminder of what’s at stake.
There are nods to the film, as well as revisions and updates. The role of coach, played here by Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman, is less of a scene-stealer than Tom Hanks Dugan’s coach, and the point about the level of his contribution is succinctly made. Rosie O’Donnell, who starred in the film, also has a small role, and it’s easy to imagine that’s where her original Doris might have ended up.
I say this as a fan of the movie, but in many ways it feels like a more complete version of the story. It’s as touching as it is funny, though it turns out there’s crying in baseball, after all.
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