It was a home run for Amazon Studios when they announced in 2018 that they were creating a series based on the classic 1992 film A League of Their Own. Described as less of “a traditional reboot and more as a modern look at the story,” the project was conceived as a one-hour comedy series. The show, set to premiere in 2022, is produced by Sony Pictures Television Studios and co-written and executive produced by Mozart in the Jungle’s Will Graham and Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson.
According to the official logline, “A League of Their Own is a half-hour comedy infusing the warmth, humor, 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 realize their dreams of playing professional baseball.”
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The original feature, which starred Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell, and Madonna, was a critical and commercial success. A League of Their Own was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 2012 by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Graham and Jacobson spoke to Davis and the film’s director Penny Marshall ahead of time for their approval of the Amazon version, according to sources cited by The Hollywood Reporter. Since Amazon’s initial announcement, a laundry list of actors has been attached to the project, with new promotional “playing cards” of four different characters posted on their respective actresses’ Instagrams. Continue reading to see new still images of 2022’s Rockford Peaches.
Vi, the bartender
Who can have a remake without a heartwarming reminder of the original? Despite her current global fame, Rosie O’Donnell as just 30 when she starred in A League of Their Own, which is considered her breakout role. Appearing on a 2021 episode of the podcast Everything Iconic with Danny Pellegrino, O’Donnell explained that co-creator Abbi Jacobson contacted her directly to get her on board the adaptation. “I had a great experience on A League of Their Own. I love the Broad City women and when I was told [Abbi] was doing League, she called me up and said, ‘Ro, would you do it?’ And I said, ‘In a minute.’ Then she sent me the pilot that she did and it was just really beautiful.”
As O’Donnell revealed to Pellegrino, she will be playing a bartender at a gay bar. She confirmed she has always interpreted her character of Doris Murphy as a lesbian, saying, “The words are totally that she finally feels she fits in amongst this group of tomboys. There’s this little bit of an undertone.”
Casey “Dove” Porter
He may not have a “card” yet, but that doesn’t diminish the significance of Nick Offerman’s role in the show. The Parks and Recreation star was cast in the crucial role of Casey “Dove” Porter, the coach of the Rockford Peaches and a central figure in the series. Former Cubs pitcher Dove is most famous for killing a dove mid-air with a forkball during a game. He was initially regarded as one of the biggest up-and-coming Major League Baseball stars but blew out his arm after three years. Now he wants to make his comeback by making the Peaches champions.
Offerman fills the role popularized by Tom Hanks in the beloved 1992 film. Hanks played Jimmy Dugan, a hyper-realistic portrayal of former AAGPBL Fort Wayne Daisies coach and MLB Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx. Offerman is also slated for another high-profile upcoming series, HBO’s The Last of Us, based on the popular 2013 PlayStation game of the same name. In March, he told Hypebeast, “I think the show will be astonishing. The caliber of artists that are working on it are absolutely top drawer. I just couldn’t believe I would get to work with the greatest talent.”
Carson Shaw
Abbi Jacobson portrays Carson Shaw “a catcher from a tiny farm town, who suddenly finds herself hopping the train to Chicago to chase a dream she didn’t even know she had.” Besides co-creating and starring in the A League of Their Own series, Jacobson is known for having the same roles on the Comedy Central series Broad City. She also voiced characters in The Lego Ninjago Movie and the series Disenchantment and also appeared in the films Person to Person and 6 Balloons.
Jacobson spoke to Paper in 2018 about the differences between the version of herself she presented in Broad City and the one she revealed in her new book of essays, I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff. “I think the heightened version of me in Broad City — and this is something I love about my job — is that I get to play all of the anxiety, fear, and nervousness physically,” she said. “Abbi’s this blubbering idiot…No one really expresses all of their uncertainties and anxieties out loud like that, and I get to work some of that out through my character. I’m way more internalized in real life.”
“I think that in terms of the writing in this book, a lot of the essays are not heightened in that way,” Jacobson added. “A lot of them are more real, and I get to write my personal anxieties and fears and doubts in a totally different way where I get to explore that part of myself, much in the same way I get to do on the show, but in a very different format.”
Clance Morgan
A native of Rockford, Illinois, Clance Morgan is described as “Max’s best friend and biggest supporter, and a budding young artist in her own right.” The character is portrayed by Sex Education’s Gbemisola Ikumelo, who is a BAFTA award-winning triple threat: she is an actor, writer, and director. She has several impressive UK film and TV credits to her name, including writing for the hit BBC sketch show FAMALA ( for which she received a Royal Television Society Award), and co-directing, writing, and starring in the BAFTA-winning TV short Brain in Gear.
Greta Gil
Comedian D’Arcy Carden is Greta Gil, “a first basewoman with unbelievable stretch. Off the field, she’s also effortless, traveling the globe seeking new adventures and liaisons.” Carden may be best known for her starring role as Janet in the NBC sitcom The Good Place, but she started her career doing improvisational comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. She’s also made appearances on TV shows, including Broad City, Veep, Barry, and numerous films. Carden told Vanity Fair in 2018 that after moving to Los Angeles in 2013, she had “a couple of floundering around years” juggling writing and acting jobs with nannying. “I did get to a point where I was like, “This isn’t going to work for me,’” she said. “Like, this dream isn’t going to happen. But it was just O.K. because you get to do some things here and there, and you get to perform at U.C.B. all the time…that thing that you wanted, that goal that you had, it’s just not going to happen. You missed it. It’s too late. Let’s be realistic. It sucks, but just keep doing what you’re doing.” A month later, she auditioned and shot pilots for The Good Place and Barry within weeks of each other.
Maxine ‘Max’ Chapman
Bad Hair star Chanté Adams plays Max, “a pitcher with an arm that could make men weep. She is ready for the big leagues, and now she just needs to make her own path there.” Adams landed her first acting gig in the 2017 biopic about rapper Roxanne Shanté, Roxanne Roxanne. She received the Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Performance for her portrayal at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Adams has also appeared in the films Bad Hair, and The Photograph and starred opposite Michael B. Jordan in the romantic drama A Journal for Jordan, which Denzel Washington directed. In a 2018 interview with Complex, when asked if Roxanne Roxanne was her dream role, she said, “My dream role… it’s so funny when people ask me that because if you were to ask me that out of college, my dream role—which I didn’t think I could get until 10-plus years from then—would be to play a really strong, black female lead and tell a story that we’ve never heard before. But, I did that.”
