The ‘A League of Their Own’ TV series is officially happening

Get ready to start screaming, “There’s no crying in baseball” all over again. Okay, so there’s no word if Tom Hanks’ famous line from the 1992 female baseball film A League of Their Own will make it into the upcoming TV series, but the important thing to note is that a TV series is officially happening.Amazon Prime confirmed the season pickup on August 6. A pilot for the reboot of the Geena Davis-starring, Penny Marshall-directed flick was previously announced and has been in development for years, but as of Thursday it is officially moving ahead… with some changes from the movie on which it’s based.According to the streamer, Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) will star in and co-create the series along with Will Graham (Mozart in the Jungle). Chanté Adams (Roxanne Roxanne), D'Arcy Carden (The Good Place), Gbemisola Ikumelo (Brain in Gear), Kelly McCormack (Killjoys), Roberta Colindrez (Vida), and Priscilla Delgado (The Protected) will also star.

 

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Not a lot of good news floating around these days, but today we got to announce that @willwisslergraham and my, reinterpretation of ‘A League of Their Own’ got picked up to series and that means I get to work with this extraordinary cast for hopefully a long time. That is some good ass news to me.

A post shared by @ abbijacobson on Aug 6, 2020 at 12:17pm PDT

The goal of this televised version of the beloved movie is to dig a little deeper into the generation of women who dreamed of playing baseball, as well as those who got a brief chance to do so from 1943-1954 when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was formed to continue pro ball while the male athletes were away at war. “The show takes a deeper look at race and sexuality, following the journey of a whole new ensemble of characters as they carve their own paths towards the field, both in the League and outside of it,” reads the official release. In other words, no Dottie or Kit in this iteration. Instead, rather than focusing on the league itself, the show will tell the stories of the women in a pre-Stonewall era.“This series is going to tell the story of inclusion, but it's also going to tell the story of exclusion and what happens when that magic door doesn't open for you — how do you have to find another way to do the thing that you love," Graham told The Hollywood Reporter shortly after the announcement.[video_embed id='2008957']More TV news: ‘High Fidelity’ cancelled after one season[/video_embed]“Our goal is to tell those stories authentically and realistically with heart, real emotion, humour, 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 colour are still going through today,” he added. “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.”“The pilot, more than the rest of the series, nods to the film in a bunch of different ways,” Jacobson said. “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.”The 1992 film starred Davis as Rockford Peaches all-star catcher Dottie Hinson and Lori Petty as her emotionally charged, pitcher sister Kit Keller (who couldn’t lay off the high ones). The movie included a small scene in which a Black woman tossed a rocket of a stray ball back to the players, implying a whole other fight for equality that was going on in the background of the overarching story. In addition to Hanks as the alcoholic coach Jimmy Dugan, the movie featured the likes of Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, Ann Cusack and Anne Ramsay.While the movie was only nominated for two Golden Globes (a best performance nod for Davis and a best original song nomination for Madonna and Shep Pettibone’s “This Used to Be My Playground”), it pulled in $132.4 million US at the box office—a success considering the $40 million US production budget.The film was also so popular that CBS took its own run at a TV show back in 1993 when it cast Garry Marshall, Megan Cavanagh, Tracy Reiner and Jon Lovitz to reprise their original roles from the film. Carey Lowell was cast as Dottie, Sam McMurray played Coach Jimmy, and Christine Elise scored the role of Kit. Unfortunately for viewers that project didn’t fare quite so well and only five of the six episodes were ever broadcast before the series was canned.Here’s hoping for the sake of fans everywhere that this show doesn’t strike out so easily when it debuts sometime in the near future.[video_embed id='2009592']Before you go: The cast of 'The Umbrella Academy' talk time travel in Season 2[/video_embed]