A League Of Their Own Reboot Series - What We Know So Far

The 1992 film A League of Their Own is one of those near-perfect movies you can watch over and over again, finding something new and emotionally rewarding each time. The fictionalized telling of the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League which existed from 1943 to 1954, lovingly directed by filmmaking legend Penny Marshall, is more than just a baseball story — it's a story about what it meant for women at that time to love the game and the struggles they were put through to find their more-than-well-earned place in the hot stadium sun.

Successfully reimagining A League of Their Own is almost too herculean a task to contemplate, but Amazon is taking a swing at the highest of high ones in the hopes that a new take could be be a home run. And while A League of Their Own was an incredible film, it does only deal primarily with one baseball season and focuses mostly on one team. With the real-life league having run for a decade, there are definitely more stories worth telling. Here's every little thing we know so far about the upcoming Amazon Prime TV series adaptation of A League of Their Own.

There is no set date, as yet, for when A League of Their Own will premiere on Amazon Prime, but we can speculate about a timeline by looking at a few factors.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the pilot began development way back in March 2018, early enough that show creators Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) and Will Graham (Daisy Jones and the Six) were able to get the blessing to reexamine this story from Penny Marshall herself prior to her passing in December of that year.

Production on the pilot is already wrapped, and since the show is already greenlit for a full first season, it's also likely that there's at least a rough cut of that debut installment at some stage of completion.

If we look at The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which is also a period piece developed for Amazon Prime, that series was greenlit for production in April of 2017 and debuted its first eight-episode season on November 29 of that same year. Hey, TV moves fast.

That being said, TV and film production have been shut down for most of 2020, and things will remain compromised at best for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, it may be more than seven months before we see the first season of A League of Their Own, but we'd bet it will still see release before the end of 2021.

How do you even begin to cast a new version of A League of Their Own? It's a daunting task, considering the killer line-up boasted by the original. Geena Davis as Dottie Hinson, Lori Petty as Kit Keller, Rosie O'Donnell as Doris Murphy, Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, Madonna just Madonna-ing all over the place as Mae Mordabito — the talent involved in that movie is simply staggering.

Fear not — to say that the new show has stacked the deck in their favor would be an understatement. The new series stars Abbi Jacobson (Broad City), Chanté Adams (Roxanne Roxanne, The Photograph), D'Arcy Carden (The Good Place, Barry), Gbemisola Ikumelo (The Last Tree, Sex Education), Kelly McCormack (A Simple Favor, The Expanse), Roberta Colindrez (Birdman, Girls), and Priscilla Delgado (Julieta, Abracadabra). Recurring guest stars include Molly Ephraim (The Front Runner, Halt and Catch Fire), Kate Berlant (Sorry to Bother You), and Melanie Field (Shrill, You).

There are only two real flaws of the original A League of Their Own: the brevity of its acknowledgement of segregation (reducing the film to one Black woman on screen for less than a minute), and the complete lack of queer representation. Looking at this new cast, we can see that those issues are being addressed.

It's also worth noting that, according to the THR report, some surviving members of the real All-American Girls Professional Baseball League will consult for the series.

According to Vernon Sanders, co-head of television at Amazon, "Will and Abbi have taken a classic movie, reimagining it for a new generation with new characters and their own fresh, modern vision on a timeless story of big dreams, friendship, love, and, of course, baseball." In other words, we don't really know anything concrete about the plot yet.

Yes, this is technically a "reimagining" with new characters and a decade of true baseball history to play with, there's not a lot we can guarantee we'll see yet in the new series. One major question we have is with regard to historical accuracy. The AAGPBL may not have officially segregated themselves, but unofficially the league was supposed to feature the "girl next door" and, put in plain terms, that meant no Black athletes allowed.

Jackie Robinson may have broken the color barrier playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, but that didn't do anything for Black women at the time. Rather than integrate by race, Black women ball players wound up playing alongside men in Negro League Baseball.

How exactly the new A League of Their Own plans to handle history is hard to say. But with Black, Latinx, and queer actors in the cast, there's no denying these stories, one way or another, will be told.