A League of Their Own Officially Renewed for Second and Final Season
A League of Their Own is rounding third and heading for home.
Prime Video has formally renewed the series adaptation for a second and final season, which is officially being billed as a “four-episode limited series.” The news confirms THR‘s report in March that A League of Their Own would indeed conclude with a very short Season 2.
“Making this show and seeing the impact it has had in the world has been an incredible joy,” co-creators Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson said in a statement. “While obviously we were hoping for 11 seasons, we’re grateful to be able to continue to tell the story of these characters and this world.”
“We’re deeply proud of the work that Abbi, Will, the cast and crew have done reimagining A League of Their Own which has produced an incredibly loyal fanbase as well as achieved numerous, well-deserved recognitions and accolades,” added Vernon Sanders, head of television at Amazon and MGM Studios. “After hearing what Abbi, Will and the writing team have planned for the new story within this wonderful series, we are excited for our fans to see what comes next.”
A reinterpretation of the beloved 1992 film, A League of Their Own follows the women who formed their own professional baseball league while the nation’s men were fighting in World War II. Led by Jacobson (Broad City) as Carson Shaw, D’Arcy Carden (The Good Place) as Greta Gill and relative newcomer Chanté Adams as Max Chapman, the series chronicles not only the racism of the era, but the lengths to which gay female baseball players had to go to protect themselves.
During the Season 1 finale, the Rockford Peaches fell to the South Bend Blue Sox in the championship game, with former Peach Jo De Luca hitting the winning home run. Carson and Greta also parted ways after the baseball season concluded… but in a cliffhanger twist, Carson’s husband Charlie spied Carson giving Greta a passionate goodbye kiss.
How are you feeling about A League of Their Own‘s renewal and cancellation? Drop a comment below with your thoughts.
BUH-BYE!
Funny, I was just thinking that about you. Toodles.
Then why are you still here?
Better than nothing, but I would have happily watched another five seasons. Loved the first.
Same. Amazon caving into the fascist right that has less money than the non-fascists. Do they not know who pays for Prime? Their loss.
Yup, they caved to the fascist right. Or the ratings sucked. One or the other.
It’s weird that so many shows when they’re cancelled are only given 3 to 4 episodes to try to cram everything in that they need to wrap up their story. But The Owl House showed that major story points can be done well in 3 episodes, even if they had to use a montage to cover some things in at least one episode.
And yes, I know it’s animation & not live action, but animation still involves writing.
If this show had done well, do people really think they would have canceled it? If Amazon could make money from this show, they would. This had nothing to do with people on the right. Like Amazon cares about people on the right considering how liberal they are.
Hate shouldn’t sell well. That’s why no stories to the right. They’re all about hate and dehumanizing people these days.
12 episodes total? This has “miniseries spread out over two years” written all over it, like that Emmy-winning Fleabag show a few years back. I guess the producers must have decided that a series like the 2022 A League of Their Own isn’t well-suited for a five-plus-season run.
Im glad the show has been cancel, it supost to be a basball show not a lebian show
Ian learn to spell challenge (5 major mistakes in one line, yikes)
I’m all for including queer themes in the story mix, because queerness certainly existed in the actual league back then. After all, the reason AAGPBL players back then got charm school training, frankly, was to teach them how to not act like dykes in public while they were representing the league. It was considered crucial to the success of the league that any hint of out lesbianism among the players be crushed. So directly tackling queerness as a major challenge of the time and in a good deal of detail would have definitely passed the smell test. I would really have liked to see it represented in the series not only on personal terms, but as a political, cultural, and social struggle of the time.
What doesn’t pass the smell test, though, is all the anachronistic language, the present-day speech patterns, and most galling of all, the use of well-known rock songs (e.g., “Piece of My Heart”) recorded a quarter century or more after 1943 as featured pieces. All of it just yanks you right out of the era they purport to represent, forcing you to wonder why they make such choices instead of just being able to immerse yourself in the story and its time. (Answer: because they’re talking to a 2023 audience, not a 1943 audience. Even if I understand that, it’s still distracting as hell.) And while we are on the topic of anachronisms: what woman having a baby in 1915 or so would ever name her girl child “Carson”?
As for the queer relationships, they actually came to constitute the A story, above the baseball itself. The baseball evolved to serving as a mere conduit for bringing the characters together so they can discuss and otherwise explore their sexuality in their off-hours. As a result, there are long stretches of no baseball in this show. And at no point did I recall seeing any pressure being put on players to hide their sexuality, instead opting to pretend that nobody in 1943 really cared that there were lesbians among them publicly acting like the lesbians they are. That also fails the smell test.
And worst of all, to me anyway, is that the few-and-far-between baseball they do portray is just terrible quality. Outside of a couple of decent swings at the plate, and maybe one good infield throw, they’re not even pretending to try to make it look realistic. Few of the actors are decent athletes, at least in a ball-playing sense. The pitchers are especially bad, in particular the Max Chapman character. This is obviously why they almost never show them on the field throwing an actual ball, but instead awkwardly throwing nothing and then adding CGI baseballs in post. And during actual games they play, the players and their play are so marginalized and insulted in the moment by coaches, PA announcers, and fans that I simply cannot believe it could have happened like that, or even close to that. I mean, come on—patrons paying good money to came to the ballpark to shower the players with hate? It makes no sense. Perhaps Abbi felt they needed to lean into a generalized victimhood to get viewers to care about these women while they are on the field.
It’s pretty clear that this show is not targeted to baseball fans, and Abbi has made it clear in interviews that this is basically the case, with the main goal to reimagine AAGPBL history to highlight queer representation. That’s fine as far as it goes, and I could totally have been on board, but for the anachronisms, the historical whitewashing, and the lack of concern for the baseball part.