It’s 1943, and Carson Shaw is running as fast as she can.
Specifically, she’s running to catch a train that will take her to Chicago for the tryouts of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, meant to fill a gap in baseball created when men who played professionally went off to war. This is how we begin the new Amazon series A League Of Their Own. Carson is played by Abbi Jacobson, late of Broad City, who co-created the series with Will Graham, a writer who’s worked on projects as varied as Onion SportsDome and Mozart In The Jungle. It’s a loving descendant of the 1992 film of the same name, as well as an ambitious effort to address its conspicuous gaps.
While this is the same baseball league as in the film (which existed in real life from 1943 to 1954), and the team is still the Rockford Peaches (can’t give up those iconic pink-and-red uniforms), this is a separate story. Characters don’t map directly from one version to the other. Where there were sisters Dottie and Kit (Geena Davis and Lori Petty), their hard-drinking coach Jimmy (Tom Hanks) and teammates like Mae and Doris (Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell), there’s a wholly new set of characters here. Two sets, actually.