There’s more to the new Prime Video series than baseball

See 8 episodes of a tv series on the baseball and not yet understand the difference between a straight ball and a curve ball, between a hitter and a pitcher. It can be done. The rules of American sport par excellence continue to be rather difficult for us Europeans who grew up on bread and the World Cup, but fortunately on Prime Video Winning girls – the series inspired by the 1992 film of the same name (in original A League of Their Own) considered a classic of the sports movie genre that Americans love so much – it’s more than just a baseball series.

Winning girls on and off the playing field

Winning Girls – The Series follows a group of girls – different from those in the movie Penny Marshall – who in the 1940s managed to play baseball professionally in the United States while men were away fighting during World War II. We first know Carson (Abbi Jacobsonalso co-creator of the series along with Will Graham), a young woman “with the face of a peasant” who in 1943 from Idaho rushed a train to Chicago to participate in the selections of theAll-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Along the way he meets pin-up Greta (D’Arcy Carden, The Good Place), the formidable hitter Jo (Melanie Field, YOU) and other stubborn girls (all played by remarkably talented actresses) who pursue the dream of becoming professional players for the team of Rockford Peaches. The series, therefore, immediately focuses on the characters: among them the tough Mexican pitcher with a heart of gold Lupe (Roberta Colindrez, Life) and sprinter Esti (Priscilla Delgado, juliet) with communication problems because he only speaks Spanish. Right from the start, the narrative adopts a humorous style to deal with delicate and evergreen topics such as the exploration of sexual orientationsport as a tool for female emancipation and, of course, the racism. All issues that the original film had only touched upon and on which instead this television transposition treads its hand, erecting itself as a bulwark of the representation on tv.

Watch Winning Girls – The Series on Prime Video

A series set in the 40s but for today’s audience

The Peaches must be a team with players who don’t look like “a bunch of lesbians” (to quote Greta). No pants in public and mandatory peach pink uniform and flawless make-up. Perfect and feminine on the face, rebellious and tormented in privatethe protagonists of Winning Girls – The Series – to which one cannot fail to become attached – they must try to win on the field and also off, discovering themselves. Carson, thus, begins to ask questions about her sexuality by writing a letter to her husband and confessing: “There is something wrong with me”; Max Chapman (Sang Adams), rejected from the auditions only because she is black, questions her dream only to then realize that “things change quickly” in a world where war is causing certainties to collapse. They might seem like anachronistic stories for the 1940s (some jokes that the authors make the protagonists pronounce), but they have a grain of truth: the creators of the series said they were inspired by the little-known stories of black players like Mamie Johnson e Toni Stoneamong the first to play in a men’s team, or as Maybelle Blairwho only came out as a lesbian at the age of 95.

What seems to us a virtue – the baseball element that is put aside or at least transformed into a vehicle and amplifier of the protagonists’ emotions – paradoxically seemed to some American critics a flaw in the series (“This show just needs more baseball. “wrote Dave Nemetz for TVLine). Which speaks volumes about how much overseas they consider this sport to be a religion. But in the end what matters is that this series looks like a good entertainment for a transversal and global audience as is that of Prime Video increasingly accustomed, fortunately, to being represented on TV.

Watch Winning Girls – The Series on Prime Video