Review: A League of Their Own. Women, baseball and a classic movie remade

A League of Their Own.

SCORES:
Laughs: 3
Drama: 4
Social issues: 5

SHE SAW

I was 11 when the film A League of Their Own was released. I remember it well, even though I wasn't at all sporty. It was rare for Hollywood blockbusters at the time to feature female-centred stories in the way it did - it wasn't a rom-com, there wasn't one token female character and no one was dying. It passed the Bechdel test with flying colours. Groundbreaking at the time, it probably set Geena Davis on the path to becoming the feminist Hollywood activist she is today. But it was flawed. The new series adaptation sets out to correct some of the original film's issues while keeping the feel-good girl power sentiment of the original.

It's created by Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson (Broad City), who plays the lead role of Carson Shaw. As with most of Jacobson's work since the final "coming out" season of Broad City, her character is a woman discovering her sexuality. Her husband's at war and while he's gone she runs away to join the All-American Professional Women's Baseball League, where she meets Broad City alum, D'Arcy Carden, in the role of Greta Gill, and sparks fly. Where the original film had a subtle wink to lesbians that you really had to be looking for to notice, the series dives into the truth of the team with much more chutzpah.

Along with multiple lesbian love stories, the show about an all-white baseball team - the Rockford Peaches - finds a way to incorporate an African American storyline in a way the film failed to do. There's a moment in the film in which a wayward ball finds its way to the "coloured" area of the stadium and a black woman returns an incredible throw back to Davis. It's a nod to the existence of talented black ball players who weren't allowed in the AAPWBL, which lasts a few seconds on the big screen.

The series, however, picks that character up and creates a world for her set in the black community. Unable to join the Peaches, baseball-mad Max Chapman (Chante Adams) gets a job at a screw factory in order to get herself a place on the all-male company baseball team.

Three episodes in, the series has addressed race, sexuality and mental health in realistic and commendable ways but is it actually any good? I think so. There's great set design, costumes and hair: the war aside, the 1940s look great on screen. Jacobson has a particular style of awkward humour that isn't always laugh-out-loud funny but, when all the elements come together, it makes for a charming series that might actually be a rom-com after all.

HE SAW

Before we started watching this new series, Zanna told me she'd watched the 1992 movie of the same name, about the same team, in the same league, at least a dozen times, so I was surprised when she later asked me to remind her what happened in that movie. I wasn't able to help: I was 14 when I watched the movie; my memories revolve around Madonna.

The series is co-created by and stars Abbi Jacobson, whose show Broad City was easily the funniest and most original sitcom of the last decade. A League of Their Own, the series, is not especially original - it's a reasonably straightforward, character-driven, sports-and-love story, mostly following the formation of the Rockford Peaches and the development of the various relationships within the team, most notably the one between Jacobson's character and D'Arcy Carden's. But it's a show that addresses social issues and, while that's not especially unusual anymore, it's still far from mainstream,. While the treatment of racial minorities and the LGBTQIA+ community is better now than it was in 1943, it's still a long way from good.

The humour is sometimes subtle - for instance, one of the characters in this female-heavy show about female empowerment goes to work at an all-male workplace called Tool and Screw - but mostly it's quite broad, with a fair dollop of sexual innuendo. Nick Offerman, who plays the team's coach, has arguably the funniest face of anyone working today. He could have no lines and would still deliver comic relief.

But the show's not about the laughs. It's engaging from the first moment of the first episode, when we follow Jacobson running for a train the conductor doesn't want her to get on. We quickly come to care about her and her story and we feel the desperation she and the other members of the team felt to break free of the restrictive lives that were available to them in the 1940s and that awaited them in the 1950s, and for decades to come. The show is about being daring, breaking down boundaries, becoming who you want to be, not who society demands, and the multitudinous ways in which society works to prevent particular groups of people from doing so.

A League of Their Own is now streaming on Prime Video.