The wait will be over on August 12! That’s right, Amazon Prime’s A League of Their Own will finally air in just a couple of months – and a teaser has just dropped!
The period dramedy, created by Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham, is an adaptation of the 1992 film of the same name. The original A League of Their Own was about World War II era women’s professional baseball and is a movie close to sporty lesbian hearts.
“28 years ago, Penny Marshall told us a story about women playing professional baseball that up until then had been largely overlooked. We grew up obsessed with the film, like everyone else,” said Graham and Jacobson in a statement.
“Three years ago, we approached Sony with the idea of telling a new, still overlooked set of those stories. With the help of an enormously talented team of collaborators, an amazing cast, and the devoted support of Amazon to this project, we feel beyond lucky and excited to get to bring these characters to life,” they added.
“It took grit, fire, authenticity, wild imagination and a crackling sense of humor for these players to achieve their dreams. We’re hoping to bring audiences a story with all of those qualities.”
The series is inspired by the 1992 classic, but will feature its own fresh characters and storylines. It will star Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson, Chanté Adams, D’Arcy Carden, Roberta Colindrez, Gbemisola Ikumel, Kelly McCormack, and Priscilla Delgado. And Rosie O’Donnell will return as the bartender!
A League of Their Own “follows brand-new characters and begins with the formation of the league in 1943 and follows the league and its players as they fight to keep it alive through close games, injuries, sexual awakenings and road trips across a rapidly changing U.S,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“The pilot, more than the rest of the series, nods to the film in a bunch of different ways,” Jacobson explained in a 2020 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “But we are really leaning into the fact that Black women weren’t allowed to even try out.
“Our version is very much about inclusion of women in professional baseball, but it’s also about the inclusion of white women and white-passing women in professional baseball. There are really heavy scenes that we’re also exploring in a major way.”
And, like all team sports, it’s gonna be lesbian. “Our goal is to tell those stories authentically and realistically with heart, real emotion, humor, joy and all the things that Penny brought to the movie — and with an eye on the world today because so much of what they went through is very much what women, queer women and women of color are still going through today,” Graham said.
“The whole goal is to be authentic and real to their experiences. But the queer stories are a big part of what ties the different parts of the show together. This is a big American story that also very much happens to be about queer women and Black women. It’ll be exciting for folks to get a window into what these women’s lives were like.
“In talking to a few of the former players about their experience as queer women at the time — one of them said to us, ‘It was a party’. As a gay person, I never heard anyone say that about a pre-Stonewall event in gay history. There’s this sense of joy, and they actually got to find things they loved and it felt like that would be a good story to tell right now.”
Stonewall didn’t give birth to lesbians, no. While we had to be more secretive, to manage our safety during more homophobic times in history, we’ve always found each other. Especially on the sporting field.
I’m sure the series will be a personal home run for Abbi Jacobson, who came out as bisexual in 2018. In November 2021, Jacobson announced that she’d been with Bomb Girls’ Jodi Balfour for a year.
Lesbians are hoping that the series adaptation of the beloved movie will go to the places that weren’t possible in the ‘90s. I mean, Ellen Degeneres had her ‘90s show, Ellen, cancelled soon after she came out in 1997. Lesbian rep isn’t great today, but at least the scraps exist.
Now’s the chance to redeem the lack of lesbian representation in A League of Their Own; the series will stream on Amazon Prime from August 12.
