I’ll be honest: I’m not a huge baseball fan. So when I first heard that there would be a new A League of Their Own series, it was pretty much regulated immediately to my mental back-burner. However, I became intrigued when I heard that D’Arcy Carden (one of the best parts of the excellent-all-around The Good Place) and Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) were attached to the project. And now that I’ve seen the teaser trailer, I would like to see this show immediately, please and thank you.
The teaser trailer does exactly what it’s meant to do. It doesn’t give us much, but it gives us just enough to leave us wanting more. Of course, we already have a tiny sense of what the series will be about, given that it shares its title with the excellent 1992 movie starring Tom Hanks and Geena Davis. A League of Their Own (the movie) tells the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. The League was formed in 1943, to keep public interest in the sport going after the majority of male Major League Baseball players were drafted into World War II. The series will be set in the same period but will focus on a different team, so it will not be simply a serialized retelling of the movie.
With that context, let’s jump into the teaser:
As I wrote above, there’s not much to it, of course. There isn’t even any dialogue. But brief flashes already give us a sense of what will be in store. Not just the creation of one of the first women’s baseball teams – at a time when women were just being allowed into the workforce at large in general. But in a time in which segregation still existed (Major League Baseball wouldn’t be integrated until 1947, with Jackie Robinson), one wonders if A League of Their Own will tell the story of the integration of a women’s baseball team in this period.
I’m also going to throw it out there that, yes, the shot lasted for barely a second. But if there wasn’t intentional sexual tension in that extremely brief clip between Carden’s character and the catcher, then apparently Carden just has UST with every woman she interacts with and someone needs to capitalize on it, already.
A League of Their Own stars Abbi Jacobson (Disenchantment, Broad City). Chanté Adams, Priscilla Delgado, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Roberta Colindrez, and Kelly McCormack also star. The series will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on August 12, 2022.