A League of Their Own is an earnest, intelligent and highly effective upgrade on the original

Abbi Jacobson, who created the comedy show Broad City (2014-19) with co-star Ilana Glazer, has always been blessed with great screen presence. Her achievements as a writer and creator on Broad City are formidable on their own but her fine performance as the aspiring artist Abbi (and on the odd occasion, an inebriated alter-ego named Val) was just the cherry on top. Jacobson’s talents both as a writer and an actor are on full display in the Amazon Prime Video series A League of Their Own (the first three episodes will be released on Friday August 12), which uses the eponymous movie (starring Geena Davis, Madonna, Lori Petty, Tom Hanks et al) as a starting point and expands upon that universe with an all-new set of characters. The show has been developed by Jacobson and Will Graham, who was previously showrunner on Mozart in the Jungle, another critically acclaimed Amazon series. The story is set during the Second World War, when American women suddenly found themselves in a variety of professional settings they were otherwise not given access to—too many of the men were off “fighting fascism”, as a fictional advertisement in the show’s opening episode proclaims proudly. But they have to do all of this amidst a lot of bias and misogyny and cultural scare-mongering about women losing their “feminine qualities” while assuming roles typically occupied by men. In the original 1992 movie, Geena Davis and Lori Petty play Dottie and Kit, two sisters who are a part of the Rockford Peaches, a real-life professional women’s team that played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League between 1942 and 1953. Here, even though Jacobson is the star of the show, the story and the episodic format allows more of a lateral sprawl for every character—Jacobson’s Carson Shaw, the team’s catcher, is a married woman as is D’Arcy Carden’s Greta, with both of their husbands off at war. Chanté Adams plays Maxine aka Max, one of my favourite TV characters in recent times. When her repeated attempts to gain entry to a men’s baseball team finally bear fruit, she gets an audition of sorts but flubs it badly. The scene has been set up and shot in a way that constantly challenges the viewer’s expectations, and Adams is fantastic in it, as she is throughout. Roberta Colindrez’s Lupe is the team’s pitcher and another scene-stealing character. There are many iconic scenes in the original movie that have received close critical attention but one of the starting points for the series was a brief moment when a Black woman returns a foul ball to Dottie (Geena Davis) with visible force; Dottie’s hand is winded by the return and we know that this lady had a killer pitching arm. That she’s not on the team or indeed, any team, was due to segregation. As Jacobson recently mentioned during an interview with the New York Times: “A bunch of white women got to play baseball; that wasn’t enough.” The show takes this dictum in real earnest. So while Carson and Greta might face patronising behaviour from men or the odd sermonising lecture on femininity from older women, they know that they have access to professional spaces in a way that’s just not possible for Max or her family. The show’s treatment of these intersecting issues of homophobia, racism and misogyny is assured and always empathetic. And the dramedy on display is first-rate, too. The sequence where we see the Peaches playing their first-ever night game (“Night baseball, the fad that’s catching on quicker than fascism!” wisecracks the typically jolly announcer at the ground) is delightful, as is the team’s first sighting of a cathedral next to their quarters at an away game. Jacobson and Carden have previously appeared together in Broad City, and their chemistry is apparent. Max listening to her conservative mother’s fears about her baseball-loving daughter “becoming an invert” (a pejorative used for queer people in the 1940s) is another knock-out scene. Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreations, in a brief role as the team’s manager Dove, is brilliant in his usual understated way. Both of the show’s creators, Jacobson and Graham, are known for their unconventional, sometimes discomfiting brands of comedy. A League of Their Own represents both of them at the peak of their powers. It is an earnest, intelligent and highly effective upgrade on the original that never has to try too hard to be funny. Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.