How the A League of Their Own TV show reimagines the Rockford Peaches
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There's no crying in baseball, but the new A League of Their Own TV series is still an emotional affair. It's been 30 years since Penny Marshall's beloved 1992 film stepped up to the plate, telling the story of the many women who fought to play professional baseball at the height of World War II. Now, the Rockford Peaches are back at bat with a new TV adaptation, which aims to recapture the magic of the original film while also spotlighting new stories on the diamond.
Before A League of Their Own debuts on Amazon Prime Video Aug. 12, EW gathered the series' cast and creators to talk about bringing the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League back to the small screen. Co-creators Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson joined executive producer Desta Tedros Reff and stars D'Arcy Carden and Chanté Adams for a wide-ranging conversation about the series. All spoke reverently about their memories of seeing the film for the first time and how they wanted to honor the original, while still forging a new path forward.
"It was never about: How can we recreate that film into a show?" Jacobson explains. "It was very much about what stories we wanted to tell that had not been told."
Graham and Jacobson have long been friends, and he first pitched the idea of a new A League of Their Own to her over dinner, while Jacobson was still working on Broad City. Both adored the film, but they also wanted to craft a new story, following an entirely new group of female players as they fought, fell in love, and — most importantly — played ball together.
Prime Video Chanté Adams and Abbi Jacobson in 'A League of Their Own'
One of the biggest differences between the show and the film is how the show explores sexuality and race — things that were only hinted at in the movie. Graham and Jacobson recall that one of the first things they learned in their research was how the league was considered a "party" for queer women at the time, allowing women to meet and mingle with minimal scrutiny. In the show, Jacobson's character Carson Shaw quickly strikes up a romance with Peaches first basewoman Greta Gill, played by Carden.
Real-life players also helped shape the show's story. Graham and Jacobson met with former players like Maybelle Blair, one of the few surviving athletes who actually played in the AAGPBL. This year, the 95-year-old Blair publicly came out as a lesbian, and Graham and Jacobson say her insight was invaluable in helping to shape the show.
"There is no one book that tells the story," Graham says. "The queer story didn't exist except in [brief] mentions. A big part of discovering the queer community was starting to talk to people. We talked to a lot of different players. Maybelle was just one of the people that we talked to, but I think that was a really important meeting for us. By that point, we had talked to a lot of people who were willing to flesh out the picture of what the queer community had been like but didn't want to talk about it so personally or publicly."
Anne Marie Fox/Prime Video D'Arcy Carden in 'A League Of Their Own'
One of the show's other key players actually isn't on the Rockford Peaches at all. Adams plays ambitious ballplayer Max Chapman, who attempts to try out for the team but is turned away, as the AAGPBL did not allow Black players. The 1992 film hinted at that exclusion with an iconic scene where an unnamed Black woman throws a pitch. In the show, however, Max is a main character, and the series follows her as she tries to find her way onto any team she can.
Although the series acknowledges the struggles that many queer women and women of color faced in the 1940s, the cast and filmmakers add that they never wanted to feel preachy. Their goal, they say, was to tell truthful stories while still maintaining a playful sense of joy.
"When I think about Black life and the Black experience, especially during this era, I think my mind and a lot of other people's minds will automatically go to the racial trauma and oppression of that time period," Adams says. "And that is not what I wanted to focus on if we were going to tell this story. It was just as important for us to highlight the Black joy that people had during this time, to highlight the Black love. I think it's so beautiful that Max comes from a two-parent household of affluent Black entrepreneurs who own their own businesses and who are in love with each other like teenagers. We don't get to see that on screen a lot, especially in that era, so that was super important."
"With any marginalized story, it can get sort of watered down to your trauma," Reff adds. "[We wanted] to show that we are so much more than that. It's so important not to be reductive in that way."
And most importantly, the cast and filmmakers say, they wanted to embrace the pure fun of playing ball.
"We were playing baseball together for months before we started acting together," Carden explains. "So there was a team of actresses that had been playing baseball together three times a week at 7 a.m., becoming a team. It was almost like the acting was an afterthought. Once we got on set it was like, 'Oh yeah, we have to act!'"
A League of Their Own premieres Aug. 12 on Prime Video. Watch the full interview above.
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