This is a shining example of what a reboot should be! Thirty years after the movie An extraordinary teamdirected by Penny Marshall and worn by Geena Davis, Tom Hanks and Madonna, A League of Their Own, an eight-part series available on Amazon Prime Video, follows the formation, trials and tribulations of a women’s baseball team in the United States during World War II. This exhilarating series on empowerment – eminently queer – ranks in the champions league. Let’s review his service record.
Like the 1992 movie, based on a true story, A League Of Their Own tells the true story of the pioneers of women’s sports in the United States. In an America in the midst of a world war, men, and many athletes, are at the front. In order to bring the public back to the stadiums, baseball league leaders came up with the idea of creating the first all-female professional baseball teams.
The film centered on the story of Dottie Hinson, played by Geena Davis, a character inspired by the catcher Dottie Green. The series also finds its anchor in a receiving character, Carson Shaw, a woman who dropped everything to join the Peaches team.
The portrait of a sexist, racist and homophobic society
Carson Shaw is played on screen by Abbi Jacobson, to whom we owe Broad Citya hilarious cult feminist series about the friendship of two twentysomethings in New York in the 2010s. She created the series with Will Graham, designer of another nugget available on Amazon Prime Video, Mozart In The Jungle.
A League of Their Own speaks not only of baseball, but above all of the place of women in the 1940s… An unenviable feminine condition that echoes that of our time, both the lack of consideration for women’s sport and the sexist and misogynistic remarks in the stands are still relevant.
The series divides its time between the debut of the Rockford Peaches team and Max (Chanté Adams), an ambitious pitcher, excluded from the league because she is black.
Most of the baseball team members are lesbians. “During the promotion, the creators of the series had a professional gamer, Maybelle Blair, speak, who said that the number of lesbians was very representative and that she was a lesbian herself, that’s how she came out for the first time at age 95, ”says Lauriane, from the Lesbien Raisonnable media.
The players frequent underground nightclubs, follow strict rules to hide their sexual orientation and bristle at the league’s version of femininity. “We were in a society where it was absolutely necessary to hide because otherwise we risked confinement in a psychiatric hospital or lobotomy”, recalls Lauriane.
A landmark queer representation
One of the storylines follows the romance between Carson and his teammate, Greta (D’Arcy Carden, the hilarious Janet of The Good Place). “It’s a series that will mark the representation of lesbians in the series”, continues the creator of Reasonable Lesbian.
And to explain: “There are more and more lesbian, queer, bisexual and pansexual characters in fiction, but often these characters are told only through a love story or the plots are centered on the coming out. There, we have a love story, of course, but we also have something quite rare in fiction: the representation of lesbian friendship. A League of Their Own presents several lesbian, queer, bis or who don’t really know protagonists, who talk to each other without there being a love issue behind, but just as friends. »
Although none of the characters were openly lesbian in the film, An extraordinary team is “an iconic LGBT movie,” creator Abbi Jacobson tells yahoo. “It’s one of all those movies with a lot of subtext. In 1992, it was difficult to make a film with so many lesbians, but there were some clues,” analyzes Lauriane.
Rosie O’Donnell, who plays Doris, one of the most obviously crypto-lesbian characters in the film, incidentally returns to the series in a glorious cameo as the owner of a gay bar.
An exhilarating series on empowerment
Most sports fiction explores how individuals learn to excel in a team by sticking together, A League of Their Own takes a slightly different route and also shows how a team’s safety net allows an individual to realize their full potential.
Over the course of eight episodes, each of the heroines will find their own way of destroying the image of the woman they are supposed to be in order to really become the individual they are. “The series shows how you find your team, whether sporty or otherwise…”, emphasizes Lauriane.
With these chiseled dialogues, its thrilling staging, its inspired interpretation, this splendid historical drama on baseball, in the manner of great sports series like Friday Night Lights Where Ted Lasso, is about something much bigger than sports.
It’s about living the life you never expected to live because of your gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. A vibrant message for a series with a “lesbian genius” of general interest.