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.
A huge commonality for Carson and Max is their sexuality, which is a big part of the show’s storytelling. As one character says, “About 35% of the teams are queer,” which was a stat none of the league’s organizers wanted repeated, known, or addressed. The film also skirted over the issue, but this show is whole-heartedly embracing the topic as central to its two leads’ identities, along with baseball. And the writers double down by including several other queer supporting characters, and exploring what that means to them having to exist in a time (1943) where society was desperate to cling to norms in wartime, and actively punishing those who defied what was deemed “morally acceptable.” The “Stealing Home” episode in particular does a masterful job linking the parallel, yet still very separate ways in which Carson and Max wrestle with how they define themselves sexually.
For Carson, it’s the struggle of being a married white woman, who is also in love with another player. Now she’s existing in a surprising new life bubble that not only encourages her to play baseball, but also contains many other women who accept her romantic proclivities as normal. But for Max, she’s not only got to fight to play the game she loves, but also figure out how to push back against her family, best friend, and small town community who want her to settle down with a nice local boy, Gary (Kendall Johnson). The episode builds to an emotional turning point for the characters, and the audience, unleashing a potent taste of the repercussions of living in a time where midwestern communities had no interest in being accepting of “inverts” and how it will continue to impact both women to the end of the season.
But there’s also a lot of baseball going on too. The series devotes plenty of time to showcasing most of the individual talents on the Peaches team, featuring their skills in actual gameplay while establishing some organic rivalries and coalescing the team more tightly over time as well. The directors all block out some exciting game action, which helps in showing the progression of the season over time and also in charting how characters are dealing with some underlying issues, like injuries or mental stumbles with the “yips,” which lends those sequences some grounded stakes. And the season finale, “Perfect Game,” has one of the most ingeniously creative, and emotionally satisfying, ways of handling the “championship game” trope.
The writers also have to be commended for the wisdom and execution of their extremely smart choices about what to carry over from the original film and what to jettison because it would only facilitate undo comparison. Yes, Nick Offerman’s Dove Porter is a former pro baseball player turned coach like Tom Hanks’ Jimmy Dugan, but Offerman’s performance choices are in such utter contrast to Hanks’ that the characters might as well exist on different planets. That’s a great thing, though, because when other crossover moments or visual winks show up, they remain subtle and don’t take you out of this story. In fact, when the infamous “crying in baseball” line is uttered in the series by a disgusted female player, by the time it pops up, the show is so confident in how it's telling its own stories, the line actually feels out of place. And that’s because the series is so successful in reframing its story to be about female baseball players told from their perspective, and never lets off the gas with that mandate. It truly distinguishes the series as something apart because all of the male characters — from Porter to Baker to Carson’s husband — are support figures who don’t steal focus like Dugan did (as great as he was) in the movie.
As for the ensemble, they’re all top notch. Adams and Ikumelo’s portrayal of the friendship between Max and Clance is something very special. Both actresses have such a natural rapport in every scene with one another, shifting effortlessly from teasing to serious to hilarious, you’d think they actually are best friends. Getting to see these two women support, love, and understand one another through some major ups and downs is one of the best parts of the show. And Jacobson pushes beyond her comedic chops to show what a great dramatic actress she is too, fleshing out Carson as a talented, compassionate, and vulnerable woman blooming in the sunshine of a passionate relationship with Carden’s Greta.
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.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/59W0Tow
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