“A League of Their Own” series co-creator Will Graham has big plans for Season 2 (as previously mentioned to TheWrap), and if the show continues to root itself in historical events from the real All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, there is plenty more story to tell.
“We’re already working on the storyboard. We know where the show is going and what the bigger arc of it is,” Graham said in a more recent interview with TheWrap after the release of the Prime Video series’ first season. “People who watch the film, they don’t know that the league lasted until 1954.”
The first season, which contains eight episodes, zooms in further on the true story of the establishment of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which was captured in Penny Marshall’s 1992 film of the same name, but not in terms of the diversity of the women who flocked to league tryouts.
“This show is really the story of a generation of women who wanted to play baseball and a lot of those women were queer,” Graham said. “I think queer audiences are very used to people sort of teasing them and giving some crumbs and giving a little, and this is a show that is trying to authentically tell those stories very wholly.”
Graham recognizes Penny Marsall’s “A League of Their Own” film’s breakthrough in 1992 and the path it paved for the more detailed television show 30 years later.
“We’re here because we’re standing on the shoulders of Penny Marshall and the cast, who told an incredibly groundbreaking version of this story in 1992. And now, we’re trying to tell another one,” he said. “I grew up with the movie. I was a little broken, queer kid who didn’t even know that word, and was playing Little League baseball, and my coach was like, ‘Why is this kid crying all the time?’ And it’s because I felt like I was undercover as a boy. The movie, in its subtext sort of spoke to me, in part because there were no films or TV shows around me that had real, explicitly queer stories.”
Graham is excited that the first season is out and telling whole LGBTQ+ stories with a balance of seriousness and joy.
“It’s been really wonderful for me [that] people [are] sort of feeling like this show is talking about things that they’re glad are being talked about, but that it doesn’t feel heavy,” he said. “That it’s entertaining and fun and an adventure, and you’re on a ride with these people. And that’s something that we really wanted from the very start of the writing process in the show – to tell these stories, through a lens of joy without looking away from the hard things.”
As for what fans can expect from a potential Season 2 (although Prime Video has not yet officially renewed the series), Graham and co-creator and star Abbi Jacobson have been dreaming that up since they first started developing the series.
“From the very start of us working on the show that the problem was never ‘how do we keep it going,’ our challenge was always ‘where do we start?’” Graham said. “And how do we bring people into this because there’s an epic story here that we’re really excited to tell next season and hopefully in a lot of seasons to come.”
Much like in Penny Marshall’s film, the Rockford Peaches have yet to see a victory on the diamond as of the first season finale of the show.
“In Season 1, we crafted an ending for them that — and they say it in the show too, it feels like a win — even though on the scoreboard, it’s not one,” Graham said. “And I think in a lot of ways that’s a metaphor for this story […] the victory’s never perfect, but the thing that you did and the journey and who you came along the way really matters. And that’s the story that we’re telling.”
Graham also hinted at continuing Max’s (Chanté Adams) storyline. Where Season 1 leaves off, she finds her way onto an industrial team that tours the states, pitching alongside another Black woman pitcher named Esther (Andia Winslow), with whom she becomes romantically involved.
“Even people who are watching the show at the start don’t necessarily know that Connie Morgan, Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson went on to play in the Negro Leagues and that hundreds of other Black women like them played in industrial teams across the country,” he said.
Graham also noted that the league expanded in its decade of existence.
“In the second year of the league, they expanded to six and then eight, and then it gradually got larger and the dimensions of it changed a little bit,” he said. “So I think that’ll be a really exciting part of the story going forward. But also, people who played on one team didn’t necessarily play on the same team the next year. That’ll be an interesting part of the story going forward too.”
As if these themes weren’t enough to go off of, there is the eventual ending of World War II and the return home of soldiers (read: male baseball players), which challenged the AAGPBL.
“It is the story of this moment where the rules change,” Graham said. “Suddenly, people are doing things that they couldn’t imagine themselves doing and then what happens when the war is over, and the men come back, and how do people merge those two realities together?”
But Season 2 of the series will drill down on the issues that come with success for some of the characters.
“A little bit of what we’re planning for season two is some of the problems of success, like now that people are paying attention and people are becoming stars, what does that do to the dynamics and how does that shift everything? which is what happened to the league in ‘44 and ‘45,” he said. “It expanded.”
Fans are no doubt crossing their fingers for that Prime Video renewal any day now.
“A League of Their Own” is now streaming on Prime Video.
