A League of Their Own is officially headed to television. On Friday, Entertainment Weekly debuted two first-look photos from the upcoming Prime Video series, which is inspired by Penny Marshall’s iconic 1992 film of the same name. The series, which is co-created by Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham, will following a wide variety of women who devoted their lives to baseball for the Rockford Peaches at the height of World War II. The series’ ensemble cast also includes Jacobson, Chanté Adams, D’Arcy Carden, Roberta Colindrez, Gbemisola Ikumel, Kelly McCormack, Priscilla Delgado, and Nick Offerman.
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“We both loved the movie,” Graham explained in the report. “We grew up with the movie, and the more we started to explore the real stories underneath it, we saw that there was an opportunity here to tell a story that was broader and included a lot of perspectives that weren’t there the first time – but with the same sense of heart and humor and unpretentious fun that everybody loves about the movie.”
That being said, the series will expand upon elements — particularly, the ways that the world of women’s baseball impacted women of color and queer woman — that were only touched upon in the original film.
“It’s definitely something that the movie and Penny Marshall hinted at, but we really wanted to expand it,” Jacobson revealed. “Max’s character (played by Adams) is based on the three women who ended up playing with men, which is an unbelievable story for all three of them. The more research we did and the more we expanded these characters, the more exciting it became to tell their stories with a modern lens.”
“We’re both queer, and that’s a big part of this story, as people have started to realize in the last couple of years,” Graham added. “I think for me, the most exciting part was that in a lot of pre-Stonewall stories, you don’t get to hear a lot of period queer stories that have a happy ending. For the most part, someone invents something really remarkable, and then they get murdered or something horrible happens to them. Here, this is a story about people who maybe didn’t fall in love with the people the world wanted them to, but they had a dream, and they found a way to fall in love and do the thing they wanted to do. That’s as heroic and amazing and still as relevant now as it was in 1992 or in 1942. So, that was a huge part of it, wanting to tell a complicated story with a lot of layers, but one with a lot of joy at its core.”
“Every single one of the women that we’ve spoken to and the stories that we’ve read, they knew that they were living at one of the most turbulent times in history, where things were changing radically around them – just like we are now,” Graham says. “All of the rules were shifting, and somehow in the midst of that change, they managed to find themselves and find a clear idea of who they were. And they got to play ball, which is the thing they all talk about wanting to do more than anything. They loved the sound of the bat, the sound of the cleats. For me, and I think for Abbi too, it’s been life-changing to be able to be immersed in those stories. We just want to share that same feeling with everybody else.”
A League of Their Own is expected to debut exclusively on Prime Video sometime this summer.
