TV

I waited so long for this series and in the end I couldn't even survive it to the end

"A League of Their Own", all eight episodes of which were released on Amazon Prime Video, is a kind of update and revision of the cult film from thirty years ago, about the women's baseball league during World War II.

The intentions are good and the expectations are high, but the series is so tedious and frustrating that it is simply unbearable to watch

Avner Shavit

08/17/2022

Wednesday, August 17, 2022, 12:05 AM

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Trailer for the series "A League of Their Own" (Amazon Prime)

In the early 1940s, the United States joined World War II.

Millions of soldiers went to the battlefield, and women filled the void they left behind.

At that time, for example, professional sports belonged only to men, but when hundreds of professional baseball players enlisted in the army, it became necessary to provide an alternative.

One of the answers was the Women's Baseball League, which was established in 1943 and survived for a few years after the war, but eventually ceased its activities and was forgotten from the pages of history.

All this changed thirty years ago thanks to the movie "A League of Their Own", which presented the story of this league with the help of wonderful stars such as Geena Davis and Madonna, and became a blockbuster.

It was directed by Penny Marshall, who previously had an impressive commercial success with "Big", and thanks to the additional blockbuster, became the first director in history to sign two films that crossed the hundred million dollar mark in the United States.

In addition to real-time success, "A League of Their Own" became a cult and is considered a milestone in the history of American culture.

He has many admirers, including in the high windows.

Hillary Clinton, for example, often quoted from it.

Idan Winitzki, a dear Walla, devoted a chapter to him in his book on the greatest sports films of all time, and it is recommended to read it to learn more about his historical background.

Baseball isn't boring, this series is.

From "A League of Their Own" (Photo: Nicola Goode/Prime Video)

Over time, more and more criticism began to surface regarding the historical representation in the film.

It is too short to list the injustices in it, but here are a few: although it is apparently progressive and feminist, its messages are ultimately quite conservative, and it presents women as breaking new ground for a brief moment and then having to return to being dedicated women and mothers.

Although it is ostensibly about female empowerment, the script repeatedly turns the center of the stage to the figure of a man - the girls' coach, played by none other than Tom Hanks, one of America's favorite stars whose presence overshadowed those by his side.

The same script also completely ignored the racism and discrimination against blacks in America in general and in the world of sports in particular, and even though in reality many of the actresses were lesbians, all the heroines are white and straight.

All these distortions are typical of the Hollywood cinema of that time.

Today we live in slightly different times.

"A League of Their Own" is a new series that came out this weekend on Amazon Prime Video, and seeks to correct the injustices that were in the movie from the nineties.

It is not a reworking nor a mortgage, but a kind of expansion and renovation of it.

Initially, the intention was to create a comedy with episodes that are less than half an hour long, but in the end the project developed differently - a drama series with eight episodes, each lasting an hour.

The story of the framework remains the same: the events of one of the teams in the women's league that arose after the war.

The volume of television makes it possible to thicken the characters, to delve deeper into the background stories, to expand the fan and above all to diversify the representation.

There are men in the film, but most of the time they remain on the sidelines, and as for the women - in complete contrast to the film, here there is hardly a single character who is straight white.

Among the plot lines are several love stories between women, and many of the characters are black or Hispanic.

Befitting baseball being the most Jewish sport in America, girls of the Moshe religion are also well represented.

The series was created by Will Graham ("Mozart in the Jungle") and Abby Jacobson, who also stars.

The character she plays is not Jewish (probably), but don't worry - one of the other characters is called Shirley Cohen.

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Correction and update.

From "A League of Their Own" (Photo: Nicola Goode/Prime Video)

Jacobson broke through in "Broad City", a wonderful series that raised anticipation for each of her future projects.

Disappointingly, "A League of Their Own" does not live up to expectations, to say the least.

How serious is the situation?

At this point I couldn't even make it past her fifth chapter.

To that extent the viewing is tiring, boring and above all frustrating.

I re-watched the movie version before the series came out, and it didn't age well either, but the movie at least has a lot of emotion, which is completely lacking here.

It also has a sense of time and place, and that Jacobson and her co-creators fail to reproduce.

While watching, it's easy to forget that the setting is America in the 1940s.

There is almost no element that succeeds in placing us in this being, and the characters constantly behave as if they came out of a coffee shop in New York of 2022.

As a baseball fan (admittedly guilty!), I must also point out that the series does not exude any love for this unique game, which is its own world with its own sporting and cultural rules.

In general, it doesn't have any of the joy of action, not even an iota of the energy, humor and irony that were in "Broad City".

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The most Jewish sport in America.

From "A League of Their Own" (Photo: Anne Marie Fox/Prime Video)

They say you shouldn't fix what wasn't broken, but the movie "A League of Their Own" was damaged, so it had to be fixed.

This project is not redundant.

This is a good idea, but its execution is a failure.

Precisely because of the emphasis on thickening and expanding the source, there is no meat here.

From expositions and background stories, everything here goes round and round and turns around and does not lead to drama and conflicts.

Instead of moments that build the tension for the climax, we get more and more atmospheric scenes, and this series just isn't going anywhere.

No wonder it didn't really gain resonance, even though there is an entire generation that grew up on the cinematic hit and a new generation that is waiting for a fix.

At least in this case, we may have to wait another thirty years for him.

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Tags

• Broad City

• baseball

• Amazon Prime Video

• their own league