I hold such affection for Penny Marshall’s widely loved 1992 baseball film A League of Their Own that, for years, I felt an irrationally strong flash of disappointment whenever its name appeared in the TV guide and I ended up flicking over to a quizshow about sport. I expected Madonna with a baseball bat; I got James Corden and golf gags. Such a terrible wrong will be righted at last by this new A League of Their Own (Amazon Prime Video), a gorgeous, warm and expansive eight-episode version of the story that inspired the film: the trials and tribulations of a women’s baseball league, put together to draw in the paying punters during wartime, which was hugely popular in its day, then all but erased from the history of the sport.
While Marshall’s film largely told the story of Dottie (Geena Davis), this has the time and the cultural appetite to tell the stories of many women from all walks of life. Abbi Jacobson, who co-created the show with Will Graham, stars as Carson, a small-town slugger who catches a last-minute train to Chicago to try out for the league. There, she meets a ragtag bunch of fellow baseball lovers who will become a new version of family.
