The new trend of film-to-TV remakes/reboots that has already seen popular titles like Lethal Weapon, The Exorcist and Westworld be adapted for the small screen has claimed another victim. Amazon Studios is reportedly set on developing a TV series upon the 1992 Penny Marshall film, A League Of Their Own.
The film starred Tom Hanks and Geena Davis and told the fictionalised story of the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during the second world war. The series will be executive produced and co-written by Will Graham (Mozart In The Jungle) and Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) and is being described as a more modern take on the story rather than a traditional reboot.
The show is being envisioned as a half-hour comedy series and Amazon has already set up a small writer’s room to get started on the scripts, although THR notes that the full deals for the show and the crew haven’t yet been finalised.
The show does have an official logline, which reads like this:
“A League of Their Own is a half-hour comedy infusing the warmth, humour and DNA of the classic film, while taking a contemporary spin on the stories of the women surrounding the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
The show will begin with the formation of the league in 1943 and follows the Rockford Peaches, season to season as they struggle to keep the team alive through close games, injuries, late night bar crawls, sexual awakenings, not crying and road trips across a rapidly changing United States.
The series dives deeper into the issues facing the country while following a ragtag team of women figuring themselves out while fighting to realise their dreams of playing professional baseball”.
Sources say that Graham and Jacobson have reached out to both Marshall and Davis to get their blessing for the project, though this isn’t the first time A League Of Their Own has tried to be adapted for television. There was a short-lived sitcom spinoff that launched in 1993 that featured several of the film’s actors reprising their roles, but the show was pulled after six episodes.
The film has enough meat on its bones and interesting historical context that it could be stretched out further and become a series without feeling like filler. Hopefully the show can have as much charm as the film, and hopefully Amazon don’t pull the plug on it like so many of their other shows. It’s based on a pre-existing property with a built-in audience, so probably not.
#Peace.Love.ALeagueOfTheirOwn
