“These stories are real,” explained Will Graham, co-creator, executive producer, and director of A League of Their Own during a TCA press conference for the new Prime Video series. “This is a show about a generation of people who wanted to play ball and had to overcome different kinds of obstacles to do that. There’re massive untold stories in this show that people will start to discover, but it’s all based on authentic experience. And just like the movie, this is a huge universal American story that also happens to be a story about women of color and about queer people.”
(Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Prime Video) Albert Cheng, Amazon Studios COO, Desta Tedros Reff, Executive Producer, Hilarie Holt-Burnett, Sony VP of Current Programming, Vernon Sanders, Amazon Studios Head of TV, Glenn Adilman, Sony EVP of Comedy Development, Chanté Adams, Gbemisola Ikumelo, D'Arcy Carden, Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham, Co-Creators & Executive Producers, Jennifer Salke, Head of Amazon Studios and Latasha Gillespie, Amazon Studios & Prime Video Global Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Joining Will Graham as co-creator, executive producer, and star is Abbi Jacobson of Broad City fame. “When Will approached me with this project and asked me to do it with him, from our earliest conversations, it was about expanding this world and that really stemmed from doing the research and finding what a broader look at this generation of women playing baseball in the 1940s looked like and what their experiences were,” Abbi Jacobson revealed. “We really learned a lot about Toni Stone and Mamie Johnson and Connie Morgan, who Chanté [Adams]’s character Max is inspired by. And the more we researched the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and Maybelle Blair was a consultant and many other women that we spoke to, we learned more about what that league was like and what a queer, little bubble of history that was for a lot of those women who played in that league.”
“Max is a Black Midwestern girl, as am I,” Chanté Adams shared about a how she connected to her character. “My aunts, my grandmother grew up in that time. I was pulling my cadence and speech pattern a lot from them while also balancing it out with the modern language or the isms that we were using.” Chanté also enjoyed the meatiness of the role. “Max’s intentions are always in the right place, but her actions weren’t always executed so perfectly. That was just a lot of juicy, spicy stuff to dive into as an actor. And also, this soulmate-ish relationship that she had with Clance, like sometimes your soulmate is your best friend. And if that rings true, then Max and Clance are truly soulmates. The unconditional love and support that they have for each other, even though they’re completely different people, the love that they share for each other is the same.”
Gbemisola Ikumelo plays Max’s best friend Clance, but also serves as a writer on the series. “In that writers’ room, a lot of our stories, our own personal experiences of what it was to be Black, queer, all those experiences, you see elements of them in the story. Some of that specificity comes from us being able to put our own voices into the story. And for me as an actress, as a Black actress, and there’s also having a slightly different experience as a Black British West-African actress and coming from these kinds of spaces, and coming into Black American world going okay it’s really, really different. But then also when you start boiling it down, you actually know there’s a lot of similarities. There’s a diaspora sort of experience as well and sort of I belong, even the line, you know, you can’t try out Max because it’s the All-American League, and I’m pretty All-American, belonging and not belonging at the same time. So, I think for us as actors, all our own experiences really fed into that.”
“There was a lot of listening and really rooting it not just in the research but in our own experiences,” executive producer Desta Tedros added. “[We] tried to amplify because queer people aren’t a monolith, like Black people aren’t a monolith. We all are having our own individual experiences, and we really wanted to highlight that. There’s a timelessness and a timeliness to these issues. Being a Black queer woman in 1943 is different than it would be now. I’m a Black woman living in 2022, but it’s not that different in a lot of ways.”
The creative team packed as many stories as they could fit in this introductory season of A League of Their Own. And while Amazon has yet to make any announcements, Will Graham did share that they’re trying to stay ahead of the curve. “We've already started writing and breaking the story for Season 2,” the co-crator revealed. “Our hope is to shoot in mid-spring. And we'll see how that works out with everything coming towards us a lot. This is our launch day. We’ve all been working on this show for such a long time, and we get to now have this moment of seeing how it connects with the world, and everything else comes after from there. But we’re just so happy and proud to be in this moment and be telling these stories, and we can’t wait to go back and do more.”
All 8 episodes of A League of Their Own are now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.
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